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"Fatalitarian?" "Fatalistic." The descending crane shot at the onset is reversed at the close, it gives the Canal St. Martin as a marvelous studio evocation while spotting forlorn lovebirds (Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont) on a riverbank bench. They get a room at the Hôtel du Nord and unveil "the little gift we brought ourselves," a pistol for their suicidal pact, downstairs the other denizens enjoy a spirited dinner to celebrate a moppet's first communion. The streetwalker (Arletty) lives with the pimp (Louis Jouvet), a saturnine photographer with a criminal past who "can't stand music and revels in the sight of blood." The owners (André Brunot, Jane Marken) dote on a Spanish Civil War orphan, the lock operator (Bernard Blier) can only chuckle when his wife (Paulette Dubost) declares herself a widow in the bedroom. Their life-worn experience is contrasted with the morbid solipsism of the young lovers, to whom the dream is a perforated heart. (In jail, their separation is visualized with overhead views of the penal grid and the honeycomb pattern of a grilled window.) Hope and despair in a continuous joust, Marcel Carné's camera accentuates the world's connections as well as its entrapments. "A change in atmosphere" is a hoodlum's yearning, donating blood is a cuckold's second profession. A doctor minces no words with the wounded ingénue: "Get shot during the day next time. I hate operating at night." Jouvet parcels out his concealed romanticism as affectingly as Bogart, when he accepts his doom a fateful bullet becomes indistinguishable from a Bastille Day firecracker. "Think of me now and then... when you see your scar." The heroine looks up at the sky before stepping out of the screen, "le jour se lève." With Andrex, Henri Bosc, and François Périer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |