A Film Canon

This charming ancestor of the romantic comedy presents a series of now-familiar tropes, most notably that of the odd couple forced into a parodic semblance of marriage that they eventually come to embrace. It also stands as an unrivalled document of the transition from silent to sound cinema, defying any categorical periodisation. In particular, Clair experiments extensively with the balance between dialogue and score, opening with a song that recurs at those moments when the content of a verbal exchange is less important than its appearance or, as occurs in the final scene, its ambiguity. At its best, this musical refrain creates a sufficiently expansive echo to effect a kind of aural mapping of Paris - or, more accurately, of the tenement that is synecdochially substituted for it. In one of the most striking scenes, Clair tracks the song as it is sung, hummed, whistled and played throughout this building, extrapolating a series of spectacular vertical pans from its movement from floor to floor. Not only do these draw wondrous attention to the superimpositions and accretions of the modernist metropolis, but they provide a tangible point of contrast to the irrealism implicit in the musical sequences, undermining their theatricality even as they depend upon it. Nevertheless, their panoramic vision is always offset by a tendency to fragment or euphemise their subjects' lives, as if to remind us that this cinematic screen is bounded to the same extent as the windows it so lovingly depicts.