A Film Canon

 

With Port Of Shadows, Carné announces himself as the most pessimistic of the poetic realists, presenting a narrative that is little more than a pretext for army deserter Jean (Jean Gabin) and orphan-turned-prostitute Nelly (Michele Morgan) to wander through a semi-industrial wasteland as indeterminate and all-pervasive as the fog that envelops it. In such an environment, friendship is reduced to sympathy for the suicidal impulse, love is never resolutely articulated as anything more than the sum of shared disillusionment and sexual attraction, and family is simply a convenient pretext for exploitation, if present at all. The result is a profound existential crisis, as the Hadean fog reduces everything to a single, incommensurable moment, jettisoning the characters from their own lives, and dooming them to drift with the deepest Hadal currents. Not only does this preclude the possibility of maritime escape, but it collapses drowning with living, producing an idiosyncratic memento mori: "To me, a swimmer is already a drowned man." This, in turn, clarifies the few moments of whiteness, or brightness, as the illusory salvation of a misplaced lighthouse, most explicitly in the conclusion, whose tragedy is offset by the glariness of a clear morning, as well as a minor character's realisation of his dream to sleep between clean, white sheets. The focus on still life also freezes, or epitomises, Jean Gabin and Michel Simon's screen personae - the former in an anonymous artist's hypothesised portrait of him "in the fog...hands in pockets", the latter in his penultimate statement: "I horrify you. But I horrify myself sometimes. Even so, I have to go on living."