Jeanne-Pierre Jeancolas, in “Beneath the Despair, the Show Goes On,” describes Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du paradis as such:
The film exists. Broad, complex, with a wealth of characters swept along by the action like the extras in the carnival scene on the Boulevard du Crime, Les Enfants du paradis marks a rare dimension in French Cinema. Like some great novels, it is both dense and heterogeneous, fragmented into a plethora of heroes who reconcile history…with the historical imaginary…and with the contemporary imaginary of its creators. (French Film: texts and contexts page 84.)
This pointed, accurate summary of the nature of this complicated, enjoyable film can be supported by several key scenes and details from the film itself.
The first statement is that the film is broad and complex. There are dozens of characters that we recognize throughout the three-hour film, the bulk of whom are members of the theatre troupe. Our main characters are Baptiste, Natalie, Garance, Lemaitre, Lacenaire, and Debureau, but we recognize other faces as the film goes on. The characters grow and change, and they play roles within the film that range from a costumed lion to Othello. The setting is also shifting and complex, as the characters move throughout neighborhoods of the city freely.
This layering of faces and places could lead the film to be called “dense and heterogeneous,” but linearity of the plot reveals to the viewer the motifs and similarities between characters. Characters are linked by place of residence, romantic feelings, blood, friendship, and other entanglements that the director takes care to elucidate so that the plot does not become overly dense. When, at the film’s end, we are left with the image of Baptiste fruitlessly searching for Garance in the carnival crowd, the complexities and layers of the film are narrowed down to simply the two main characters and their shared connection.
Jeancolas goes on to say that this entanglement of the characters in Les Enfants contributes to the fact that this is not a happy film; it is “a film about despair” and the characters’ endless love triangles and complications lead to unhappiness. However, the film manages not to be dark, because small moments of happiness are treasured and carry the characters through. For example, Baptiste makes it through the loss of Garance by cradling the memory of their one night of romance together. It gives him that “light” in his eye, that “glow.” As the film made its debut during wartime, the audience could certainly appreciate the value of a small piece of happiness amid a sea of gloom.
Towards the end of the film, Garance makes a statement that can sum up both the changes of the main characters as the film goes on, and the sentiment present in the real world following the outbreak of two devastating global wars. She says, “I’m not sad, and not cheerful either. A little spring has broken in the music box. The melody is the same, but the tone is different.” As Jeancolas says, in the film and in reality, “beneath the despair, the show goes on.” There is still hope for the future, but the carefree, worry-free nature of the past no longer exists. The “tone has changed” for the characters in the film, who have witnessed unrequited love, loss, and murder, and for the world that has witnessed war, but the melody goes on as life must.
