Classic 40s Movie: Les enfants du paradis | Go Into The Story

Classic 40s Movie: Les enfants du paradis

And a masterpiece of storytelling of a kind that’s out of the mind of an utterly unique sensibility obsessed with ambiguity: political, sexual, moral—that of director Marcel Carné, himself a study in ambiguity. (Sidebar: Walk, don’t run to read William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. You’ll learn more about writing than you ever thought possible. This is a former investigative journalist telling you this.)

What may well have been structured as a film acceptable to the Nazi/Vichy regime in occupied France and filmed under well-nigh impossible wartime conditions, rife with accusations of collaboration and even anti-semitism, Les Enfants has survived all that to become what’s generally accepted as the French film of the 20th Century.

It’s a Victor Hugo-scale piece of storytelling that’s not about the Anglo-Saxon tradition of allegory and linear storytelling but a “grasp in the dark” at the ancient Greek form of melodrama, in which the powerless seek glimpses of significance from the gods, essentially mysterious.

But why?

“What people really are (winking), really, at the bottom of their hearts, they keep quiet about, they hide carefully,” suggests Lacenaire, Garance’s lover and the criminal doomed to the guillotine. Les Enfants is the best investigation I’ve ever seen of ambiguity, those things we do to keep ourselves from ourselves.

Fuente: Classic 40s Movie: Les enfants du paradis | Go Into The Story.