A Film Canon

 

 

Daybreak is both Carné's bleakest and most romantic film, clarifying his pessimism as an inverted romanticism, the distant memory of a world that could still be redeemed by love. Hence its idiosyncratic narrative, in which factory worker Francois (Jean Gabin) commits murder, barricades himself inside his apartment, and recollects the love that led to his crime. In many ways, the depictions of this apartment and building are the film's strongest moments, exhibiting an oblique, striated claustrophobia that comes closer to a noir sensibility than any French film to date, and is bolstered by Carné's increased experimentation with sequence shots, especially around the vertiginous stairwell. That said, the flashbacks, which constitute the bulk of the film, elegantly subvert the romantic fantasy even as they eulogise it, associating love with a paternal, protective impulse whose incestual subtext contributes to the suddenness of the murder, provides a chilling variation on Carné's vision of universal orphanhood, and constitutes an abstraction of the prostitute- client relationship, clarifying the latter as paradigmatic in such a universe. In the same way, Gabin's characteristic detachment is clarified as a defence mechanism against unrealistic romanticism, rather than a mere rejection of it, such that his love affair is imbued with melancholy from its inception, translating the paradoxes of the flashback narrative into affective terms, and recalling Port Of Shadows' unusual definition of still life.