A Film Canon

Like Port Of Shadows, Hôtel Du Nord diagnoses the "suicide bug", whose defining symptom is a brooding restlessness, and whose contagion manifests itself as an "unusual atmosphere". However, whereas the earlier film construed this atmosphere as a function of shadow, Hôtel Du Nord construes it as a function of a more categorical darkness, or blackness, as if to present characters speaking from the depths of their own imminent annihilation, rather than from a situation in which the distinction between existence and annihilation has ceased to be meaningful. In keeping with this slightly more optimistic outlook, which may be attributable to the absence of screenwriter Jacques Prevert, Carné offers a less equivocal affirmation of love, acknowledging that it may cure the disease that it helps create. Hence the pervasive metaphor of blood as agent of both destruction and reconstruction, the narrative opening with a First Communion, set in play by a transfusion, and turning on whether its protagonist, Edmond (Louis Jouvet) is the kind of man who could behead chickens. This, in turn, produces a metaphorical complication of bloodlines, genealogy, and family, contributing to the evocation of an orphaned world, albeit one in which the absence of any stable source of authority opens up previously unacceptable sexual avenues, as well as a freelance self-creation that can be as liberating as it is disorienting. The result is a melancholy portrait of the title hotel, and outside street, as a space of shared wanderings, or as leading onto such spaces, whether in the form of prostitute Raymonde's (Arletty) haunting Metro beat, or the more distant lanes of Le Havre.