Children of Paradise (French: Les Enfants du Paradis, [lez‿ɑ̃fɑ̃ dy paʁadi]) is a two-part French romantic drama film by Marcel Carné, produced under war conditions in 1943, 1944, and early 1945. Set in the theatrical world of 1830s Paris, it tells the story of a courtesan and four men—a mime, an actor, a criminal and an aristocrat—who love her in entirely different ways.
It has received universal critical acclaim. "I would give up all my films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis", said nouvelle vague director François Truffaut. In Truman Capote's The Duke in His Domain (1957), actor Marlon Brando called it "maybe the best movie ever made". Its original American trailer positioned it as the French answer to Gone With the Wind (1939), an opinion shared by critic David Shipman. A 1995 poll of 600 French critics and industry professionals voted it the best French film ever made.
Contents
Title
As noted by one critic, "in French, 'paradis' is also the colloquial name for the gallery or second balcony in a theatre, where common people sat and viewed a play, responding to it honestly and boisterously. The actors played to these gallery gods, hoping to win their favour, the actor himself thus being elevated to an Olympian status." The film contains many shots of the audience hanging over the edge of these balconies (which are similarly known as "the gods" in the British theatre), and screenwriter Jacques Prévert stated that the title "refers to the actors ... and the audiences too, the good-natured, working-class audience."
Story
Précis
Children of Paradise is set in the theatrical world of Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), centered on the area around the Funambules theatre, situated on the Boulevard du Temple – pejoratively referred to as the "Boulevard du Crime". The story revolves around a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance (Arletty). Four men – the mime Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the thief Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) – are in love with Garance, and their intrigues drive the story forward. Garance is briefly intrigued/involved with them all, but leaves them when they attempt to force her to love on their terms, rather than her own. The mime Baptiste is the one who suffers the most in pursuit of the unattainable Garance.
Sources
The four men courting Garance are all based on real French personalities of the 1820s and 1830s. Baptiste Deburau was a famous mime and Frédérick Lemaître was an acclaimed actor on the "Boulevard of Crime" depicted in the film. Pierre Lacenaire was an infamous French criminal, and the character of the Comte Édouard de Montray was inspired by the Duc de Morny.
The idea for making a movie based on these characters came from a chance meeting between Carné and Jean-Louis Barrault, in Nice, during which Barrault pitched the idea of making a movie based on Deburau and Lemaître. Carné, who at the time was hesitant about which movie to direct next, proposed this idea to his friend Jacques Prévert. Prévert was initially reluctant to write a movie about a mime, "Jacques hated pantomime" his brother once said, but Barrault assured Prévert, that he and his teacher Étienne Decroux, who plays Baptiste's father in the film, would take responsibility for developing the mime sequences. According to Trauner, Prévert then saw an opportunity to include the character of Lacenaire, the "dandy du crime", who fascinated him. The Germans were then occupying the whole of France, and Prévert is rumoured to have said "They will not let me do a movie about Lacenaire, but I can put Lacenaire in a film about Deburau". The script incorporates quotations from Lacenaire's autobiography.
Plot summary
Children of Paradise is divided into two parts, Boulevard du Crime ("Boulevard of Crime") and L'Homme Blanc ("The Man in White"). The first begins around 1827, the second about seven years later. The action takes place mainly in the neighbourhood of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, nicknamed "Boulevard of Crime" because of all the melodramas and bloody scenarios offered to the largely plebeian public each evening. There are two principal theatres: the Théâtre des Funambules ("Theatre of Tightrope Walkers") specializes in pantomime, since the authorities do not allow it to use spoken dialogue, which is reserved for the "official" venue, the Grand Theatre.
Part I: Boulevard of Crime
A young actor and womaniser, Frédérick Lemaître, dreams of becoming a star. He meets and flirts with Garance, a beautiful woman who earns her living by modestly exhibiting her physical charms in a carnival show. Garance staves off Frédérick's advances and goes to visit one of her acquaintances, Pierre-François Lacenaire, a rebel in revolt against society. Lacenaire is a proud, dangerous individual who works as a scrivener to cover his organized criminal enterprises. Shortly thereafter, Garance is accused of stealing a man's gold watch while she is watching a pantomime featuring Baptiste Deburau and a barker (Baptiste's father) in front of the Funambules Theatre. Lacenaire is in fact the guilty party. Baptiste, dressed up as the stock character Pierrot, saves her from the police by silently acting out the theft, which he has just witnessed. He reveals a great talent, a veritable vocation for pantomime, but falls immediately and irremediably in love with Garance, saving a flower she thanked him with. In the background, there is a price list for various seats, including Paradise, which is visible over the mime's shoulder.
Baptiste's father is one of the stars at the Funambules. The daughter of the theatre director, Nathalie, who is a mime also, is deeply in love with Baptiste. Before the performance that evening, a used-clothes peddler named Jéricho reads in her palm that she will marry the man she loves, as he knew her father was worried about her mood affecting her performances. When a fight breaks out that evening between two rival clans of actors, Baptiste and Frédérick manage to calm the crowd down by improvising a mime act, thus saving the day's receipts. The most enthusiastic of the spectators are those seated in "paradise" (paradis), a term denoting in French theatrical language the top floor of the balcony, where the cheapest seats are located.
Production
The film was made under extremely difficult conditions. External sets in Nice were badly damaged by natural causes, exacerbated and compounded by the theatrical constraints stemming from the German occupation of France during World War II. The film was split into two parts because the distributor, Gaumont, could only screen a three hour film half as many times as usual. By making the film a pseudo double feature, the distributor could charge eighty-francs per admission, double the usual amount, therefore making up the shortfall.
Barrault nearly missed performing in the film. He was committed at the time to the theatrical premiere of The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin), which became a hit. He almost offered his role of Baptiste to a music hall entertainer, Jacques Tati, then little known, before a revised film production schedule was negotiated that allowed Barrault to fulfill both roles.
According to film critic Pauline Kael, it was alleged that "the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed". Many of the 1,800 extras were Resistance agents using the film as daytime cover. Until the liberation of France, they had to mingle with collaborators and Vichy sympathisers imposed on the production by the authorities. Alexandre Trauner, who designed the sets, and Joseph Kosma, who composed the music, were Jewish and had to work in secrecy throughout the production. Music was provided by the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire under the direction of conductor Charles Münch, who contributed part of his income to the French Resistance. Trauner lived (under an assumed name) with Carné and Prévert during the six months it took them to prepare the script. Maurice Thiriet, Kosma's orchestrator, acted as his front.
The set builders were short of supplies and the camera crew's film stock was rationed. The financing, originally a French-Italian production, collapsed a few weeks after production began in Nice, due to the Allied conquest of Sicily in August 1943. Around this time, the Nazis forbade producer André Paulvé from working on the film because of his remote Jewish ancestry, and production was suspended for three months. The French company Pathé took over the film, whose cost was escalating wildly. The quarter-mile long main set, the "Boulevard du Temple", was severely damaged by a storm and had to be rebuilt. By the time shooting resumed in Paris in early spring of 1944, the director of photography, Roger Hubert, had been assigned to another production and Philippe Agostini, who replaced him, needed to analyse all the reels in order to match the lighting of the non-sequential shot list; all the while, electricity in the Paris Studios was intermittent.
Reception
Children of Paradise was the third most popular film at the French box-office in 1945. The Variety review in December 1944 stated: "This ambitious French film turns out to be a strange mixture of the beautiful, the esoteric and the downright dull. Some startling flashes of inspired mimicry and fresh Gallic humor ... in an uneven performance of writing and direction ... Barrault is brilliantly effective as the sensitive, lovelorn mimic. Other lead parts are sharply defined and maintained consistently in a film which is a peak of thespian artistry."
As years went by, critics began to single out the film for exceptional praise. In 1947 in The Nation magazine, James Agee wrote:Children of Paradise ... is close to perfection of its kind and I very much like its kind—the highest kind of slum-glamor romanticism about theater people and criminals, done with strong poetic feeling, with rich theatricality, with a great delight and proficiency in style, and with a kind of sophistication which merely cleans and curbs, rather than killing or smirking behind the back of its more powerful and vulgar elements. Pauline Kael remarked that this "lushly romantic creation ... is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theatre and life." Parker Tyler wrote that "Carné would be a world-ranking director with this film alone." British critic Leslie Halliwell bestowed a rare four-out-of-four stars rating on the film, calling it "A magnificent evocation of a place and period, this thoroughly enjoyable epic melodrama is flawed only by its lack of human warmth and of a real theme. It remains nevertheless one of the cinema's most memorable films." Leonard Maltin was also enthusiastic, lauding it as a "Timeless masterpiece of filmmaking (and storytelling), focusing on a rough-and-tumble theatrical troupe in 19th-century France ... Wise, witty, and completely captivating."
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 98% of 42 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; with an average rating of 9.2/10. The site's consensus reads: "Strong performances abound, and Carné's wit and grace are evident in this masterful (if long) French epic." The film critic Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movie" collection in 2002. Time magazine included Children of Paradise in a 2005 All-Time 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923.
Release versions
The film premiered in Paris at the Chaillot Palace on 9 March 1945. Carné then fought with the producers to have the film shown exclusively in two theatres (Madeleine and Colisée) instead of one, and to screen a release version that contained the film in its entirety without an intermission. He also pioneered the idea of the public being able to reserve their seats in advance. The producers accepted Carné's demands on the condition that they be able to charge double the price of admittance. Children of Paradise grew into a major success, remaining at the Madeleine Cinema for 54 weeks.
In the United States, Prévert received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 19th Academy Awards in 1947; however, it is not clear which version of Children of Paradise the Academy voters were watching. Variety described the U.S. version at that time as "a 144-min., inadequately-subtitled" film being shown in New York theaters.
Restoration
In March 2012, Pathé released a restoration of the film. It required scanning the badly damaged original camera negative, and other early sources, using a high-resolution 4K digital process to produce a new master print. The restored edition was released on Blu-ray Disc in September 2012.