Les Enfants de Paradis

The other night, after seeing Les Enfants de Paradis at the Brattle, I was strongly moved to both ecstatic praise and frustrating anger. There was and is no doubt in my mind that the movie is a masterpiece--in acting, screenplay, photography and direction. I was angry at myself only because I had never learned French well enough to do without the English subtitles. I have seen many French movies, and never felt so furious about this, but I have never seen a foreign language movie comparable to Les Enfants de Paradis.

Fortunately, much of the movie needs no supplementary conversation. The pantomime of Jean-Louis Barrault is eloquent; the bluster, cunning, and charm of Pierre Brassuer is largely expression of hands, mouth, eyes and the intonations of voice; and the earthy beauty of Arletty defies description. It is Arletty, and my changing impressions of her throughout the movie, that I remember most vividly. For the first time in my experience, an actress who seemed plain at the beginning became more and more beautiful as the story wove its way to an ending, until I found myself not consciously seeing her physically but very much aware of her loveliness and the simple beauty of the character created by author Jacques Prevert. It was the same sensation you often feel about good friends; after a while one is no longer conscious of their looks--even the homeliest become familiar and, in a way, handsome.

Les Enfants is a story of Paris before the revolution, of actors and street entertainers. Arletty is an actress named Garrance, mediocre in her theatrical skill, but inordinately wise in the ways of people and of love. One feels at times that her strange love affair with Barrault, the great mime Baptiste, would be mawkish and unbelievable if both artists were not so expert, and if the direction were not perfect. It is quite difficult to successfully film a scene where a man passionately in love with a woman he has never known walks out of her room as she stands waiting for him. To follow this by having his best friend seduce the woman a few minutes later might easily be trite and burlesque. But there is nothing jarring in Les Enfants de Paradis; the only awkwardness is in a few transitions, where part of the film has been cut.

In its simple love scenes, garrulous crowd scenes, smoky theatre scenes, one feels the presence of real people, moved by passions and dreams that glide them away from their grimy, frantic day-to-day struggles. And from the first panorama of a street sideshow to the last shot of Baptiste crying for Garrance as he shoves his way through a crowd of masked revellers, one exists with them in the paradise-hell of this motion picture.