A Film Canon

The most ambitious French film to date, The Children Of Paradise translates the unusual definition of still life elaborated by Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prevert in Port Of Shadows and Daybreak into historical melodrama, or even fantasy. As the most sought- after woman within the 'Boulevard du Crime' - and, more generally, the 1830s Parisian theatrical mileu that it encompasses - Garance (Arletty) finds herself faced with four modes of romantic address - the aristocratic (Louis Salou), criminal (Marcel Herrand), theatrical (Pierre Brasseur) and mimed (Jean-Louis Barrault); that is, extravagance, aggression, banality and silence. In opting for Baptiste, the mime, Garance ostensibly satisfies her continual plea for straightfoward, uncomplicated pleasure: "You must understand me. I'm simple, so simple". Yet their pervasive miscommunication reconfigures this desire around the deeper silence of death, such that real consummation only comes with an extended mime sequence; the romance between a statue and the child capable of imagining, or dreaming, that it is invested with life. That said, this indistinguishability between life, and the mere imagination of life, suffuses the film ("Dreams, life, they're the same thing. Otherwise life's not worth living") and, despite contributing to an ostensible simplification of pleasure (as in the continual, backstage insistence that all formal, or aesthetic, considerations be subordinated to it), actually complicates it, insofar as it ensures that all pleasure is infused with a hypothetical distance; or, alternatively, that the film's theatricality is just pronounced enough to temper the pleasures of cinema without fully replacing them with those of the theatre itself, as if to evoke a world in which all pleasure has been occupied, and so can only be evoked by gathering and conflating the places where it doesn't occur, in much the same way as Garance and Baptiste's melancholy circumnavigations. Hence the magnificent conclusion, in which Alexandre Trauner's epic production design gradually choreographs and simplifies an ecstastic crowd into the inanimate, mechanical mass that enables Garance's traumatic, apotheothic, disappearance.