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Voyage autour de ma chambre... The corpse on the stairway and the culprit at the top of the tenement, the camera begins on the pavement and looks up. He's a laborer (Jean Gabin) besieged in his flat, amid police bullets he remembers how he got there, l'amour et la mort. A gradual demise (his lungs are encrusted with sand from factory drudgery) a bit alleviated by romance with a fellow orphan, the flower shop clerk (Jacqueline Laurent). "One twinkly eye and one sad eye," the heroine's teddy bear and also the beau who follows her to the music hall where she meets up with the slimy artiste (Jules Berry). Overlapping triangles, the last side is the forthright assistant (Arletty) who holds no illusions of love in her fling with the doomed prole. "Do I look as if I live on memories?" A spiritual barometer of France ca. 1939, a resigned landscape studded with oneiric mementos. Innocents exploited, cynics moved, fiends destroyed, and the dawn comes regardless—so it goes with "poetic realism," a Langian construction adjusted by Marcel Carné for lyrical melancholia. Gabin's abruptness grounds the despairing mood: "Melodrama bores me," declares the lug who whispers to his beloved in the hothouse and blasts at the gathering crowd from the crumbling balcony. The "rotter" trains pooches by burning their paws and fabricates a whole family story to throw off the protagonist, he flinches at being called "dégueulasse" and then shrugs: "Well, why not? It has its advantages." The tainted brooch and the wardrobe barricade, the metaphysical room that fills up with gas à la Scarface while outside the two contrasting women share an instant of desperation and irony. "The wheel turns and we're back where we started," an alarm clock rings to mock a denied awakening. With Mady Berry, René Génin, Arthur Devère, and Bernard Blier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |