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Poetry of performance and performance of poetry, "a peculiar craft," cf. Hawks' Twentieth Century. The spirit of 19th-century France is Arletty sumptuously ironical while half-naked in a barrel, the peepshow of Truth with mirror in hand is typical of the allusive Jacques Prévert wit. Everybody's Muse, everybody's Sphinx, the moon to the lovestruck mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), who insists on the ethereal ideal. "People love that in books, in dreams. Not in real life." The avid thespian (Pierre Brasseur) prefers declamatory words to expressive silence, his grasp of Shakespeare comes in handy when picking up maidens on the Boulevard du Crime: "Paris is small for those who share a passion as great as ours." The dandified cutthroat (Marcel Herrand) sees the misanthropic farce of it all (tragedy is the inferior genre, "how depressing"), the priggish count (Louis Salou) buys but cannot possess the grand courtesan. "We run in circles, like circus horses." The luxuriant Stendhal past and the oblique Vichy present, an epic of clandestine engraving by Marcel Carné. The proscenium of teeming streets, Théâtre des Funambules busy like Footlight Parade, the divine vantage of upper balconies. The artiste is "a sleepwalker on a roof," suddenly petrified upon seeing his beloved on the wings with another. (Barrault's soulful boniness harmonizes marvelously with Artletty's rounded carnality.) Beauty is not the norm but rather "an affront to an ugly world," the Pierrot is repulsed by the mangy ragman (Pierre Renoir) yet it's his romanticism that proves most wounding to the devoted wife (María Casares). A work of literate sweep and chimerical elegance, a classical veneer on Resistance codes. "A spring broke in the music box. The tune is the same but in a different key." The showfolk community extends to the beggar playing blind (Gaston Modot), Wellman's The Public Enemy is visible in the sauna murder, Paris unites and Paris separates. "La pièce est finie." The great responses are by Renoir (Le Carrosse d'or) and Ophüls (Lola Montès). Cinematography by Roger Hubert. With Marcel Pérès, Pierre Palau, Fabien Loris, Étienne Decroux, Louis Florencie, Raymond Rognoni, Marcelle Monthil, Jane Marken, and Albert Rémy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |