It is said to be the best French film ever made. François Truffaut admitted to Marcel Carné, “I’ve made 23 movies, and I’d give them all up to have done Children of Paradise.” It is also said that the film is always playing in a theatre somewhere in Paris, at any given time. The story is, after all, set in Paris.
The film is 3 hours and 10 minutes long, and during the last hour we kept checking the clock because we didn’t want time to pass so quickly. And when it was over, we wished we had another hour.
It starts slowly, showing us a world of hucksters and aristocrats, thieves and courtesans, pimps and seers, on the Boulevard of Crime (Boulevard du Crime). It’s called the Boulevard of Crime not because of the crimes being committed there, but because of the spectacles being offered by the two great theatres on the street: the Théâtre des Funambules, which is only allowed to put on mime shows, opposite the Grand Théâtre, where actors perform.
Jacques Prévert wrote the screenplay (we have just discovered that Prévert was also a screenwriter, not only a poet, and that he and Carné had collaborated on several films before Les Enfants du Paradis), and Marcel Carné directed it like a visual novel. The reason the film’s length is essential is that it takes its time allowing the characters to unfold and the viewer to really connect with each one. And of course, the characters are so naturally written by Prévert (for these specific actors, no doubt), with the vitality of a Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac. Not that Jacques Prévert was lesser than any of the greats. It was, in fact, his poems that raised us and introduced us to French poetry.
The film shows us the behind-the-scenes world of 19th-century theatre, while juxtaposing theatre with the city, actors and mimes with the real people behind their roles, and the great difference between the two art forms. But for us, it also feels like a bridge between, and an evolution of, the art forms themselves, in much the same way that silent movies evolved into “talkies”, despite how worlds apart the two seemed to be.
We think that François Truffaut paid homage not only to the world of cinema with his Day for Night (La Nuit américaine), but also to his favourite film: one showing the behind-the-scenes reality of making a play, and the other of making a movie.
And that’s how Les Enfants du Paradis commences: with a closed curtain and three deep drumbeats, blending theatre and cinema right from the start.
The storyline is quite simple - if you consider Shakespeare simple too. It’s a story of people and characters, decisions and consequences. Four men are besotted with a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance: a mime, Baptiste (his stage name), Jean-Gaspard Deburau (his real one); an actor, Frédérick Lemaître; a thief, Pierre François Lacenaire; and a count, Édouard de Montray. It’s worth mentioning that Nathalie, the woman who loves Baptiste, is played by Maria Casarès, the long-time lover of Albert Camus.
There is no point in revealing the story for those who haven’t seen the film, because the magnificent part of it is, first and foremost, the acting. We can’t recall another movie that enchanted us so much simply through its performances. It would be a different film if Jean-Louis Barrault (then a star at the Comédie-Française) wasn’t so mesmerising as Baptiste.
Not only him, of course, but Marcel Carné allows us the privilege of witnessing parts of two or three of his performances as a mime, and he is truly captivating.
Garance is confident, free-spirited, independent and witty.
That’s why they are all enamoured with her.
When the thief Lacenaire tells her, “I’d spill torrents of blood to give you rivers of diamonds”, she looks him in the eye and replies, “I’d settle for less.”
The Title
As noted by DeWitt Bodeen, “in French, ‘paradis’ is also the colloquial name for the gallery or upper balcony in a theatre, where common people sat and watched a play, responding to it honestly and boisterously. The actors played to these gallery gods, hoping to win their favour, the actor himself thus being elevated to an Olympian status.”
Jacques Prévert himself explained that paradis was the name for the cheapest, furthest-away seats in the theatre - the popular seats - and, when asked who the “children” were, answers: “the actors… and the public too, the popular and good-natured public.”
Behind the Scenes
The film is divided into two parts:
Part 1 — “Boulevard of Crime” / “Boulevard du Crime”
Part 2 — “The Man in White” / “L’Homme blanc”
Why? Firstly, because there is, of course, a major turn in the story. But the practical reason was that the Nazis and the Vichy banned films with long-time over 90 minutes and Carné wanted to get around them by presenting it as two films, shown together.
Les Enfants du Paradis was shot in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and released in 1945. Its sets sometimes had to be moved between the two cities. Shooting a film on such a scale during wartime was ambitious, to say the least. But what is truly remarkable is that the production also served as a cover for the French Resistance: more than 1,800 of the film’s extras and actors were involved in the Resistance.
Production was often halted. Actor Robert Le Vigan, who had initially been cast as Jéricho, was sentenced to death in absentia by the Resistance for collaboration with the Nazis and was replaced by Pierre Renoir, the older brother of Jean Renoir.
Set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma, both Jewish, worked secretly during production and were left uncredited in the titles to protect them.
And by the time of the premiere, with Paris liberated, the film’s star, Arletty, was in prison.
The Real Life Characters
Our protagonist, the beautiful and charismatic courtesan Garance, was entirely a creation of Jacques Prévert’s imagination. The four men courting her, however, were all based on real French personalities of the 1820s and 1830s - personalities worth discovering a little further, along with the extraordinary Arletty herself, who brought Garance to life.
ARLETTY
Arletty was eccentric, provocative and every bit as fascinating as Garance. Born Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat, she borrowed the name Arlette from the heroine of a Guy de Maupassant story, then gave it a little French-film-star treatment by changing the final e to a y. Before becoming an icon of French cinema, Arletty worked in music halls and cabaret and even modelled for artists including Braque and Matisse. Her distinctive voice, sharp wit and unmistakable gouaille soon made her a star.
Her great collaboration with Marcel Carné produced “Hôtel du Nord”, “Le jour se lève” and, of course, “Children of Paradise”, where she became unforgettable as Garance. But Arletty’s real life had enough drama for its own screenplay. During the Occupation, she had an affair with German Luftwaffe officer Hans-Jürgen Soehring, which led to her arrest and conviction for collaboration after the Liberation. Yet her fame offered her a degree of protection that other French women were denied. She was simply too famous to suffer the humiliation inflicted on women accused of fraternising with German soldiers - having their heads shaved, swastikas painted on them and being paraded through hostile crowds. After a few weeks in prison, she served the remainder of her sentence under detention at a private château. Her famous unapologetic response to the affair was “My heart is French, but my ass is international”.
JEAN-GASPARD DEBURAU
In the film, Jean-Gaspard Deburau appears under his stage name, Baptiste. The real Deburau was a Bohemian-born French mime and the star of the Théâtre des Funambules. His most famous creation was Pierrot, the pale, melancholic figure who would become the godfather of the Pierrots of Romantic, Decadent, Symbolist and early Modernist art. Before Pierrot became a cliché, Deburau made him an icon.
His private life was almost as theatrical as his stage one. Deburau became involved with Marie Duplessis, the celebrated Parisian courtesan who would soon be immortalised as Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias. And there was also a darker episode: in 1836, Deburau killed a man with a blow from his cane after the man insulted him. He was acquitted and returned to the stage, where his popularity remained undiminished. Pierrot, it seems, had a surprisingly murderous godfather.
FRÉDÉRICK LEMAÎTRE
Born Antoine Louis Prosper Lemaître, was one of the great stars of the Parisian stage, famous for his flamboyant performances across melodrama, comedy and Romantic drama. His breakthrough came in 1823 with “Robert Macaire”, a role he famously transformed from a serious melodramatic villain into a grotesque, swaggering comic character. The character became a sensation and was later immortalised in Honoré Daumier’s caricatures.
Lemaître went on to become one of the defining actors of “the Boulevard du Crime”, performing works by Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Balzac. He created the role of “Ruy Blas” for Hugo and became known as the “Talma of the boulevards.”
And this is where “Children of Paradise: gets particularly delicious: Lemaître really did know Deburau and work at the Théâtre des Funambules, before becoming a star in his own right. Carné therefore wasn’t simply inventing a theatrical friendship for the film, he was recreating a little piece of the real-life Parisian stage.
PIERRE-FRANÇOIS LACENAIRE
Pierre-François Lacenaire was the “dandy du crime”, a murderer, poet and self-styled rebel who became one of the most notorious figures of 1830s Paris. Born into a respectable bourgeois family, he turned against the society he came from, spending time in prison, writing poetry and eventually committing murder. At his trial, rather than showing remorse, he treated the courtroom almost as a stage, presenting himself as a bourgeois romantic criminal and a rebel against an unjust society. He was guillotined in 1836, aged just 32.
Lacenaire fascinated Jacques Prévert so much that he became one of the reasons “Children of Paradise” was written in the first place. During the German Occupation, Prévert reportedly joked that if he could not make a film about Lacenaire, he could simply put Lacenaire in a film about Deburau. He based the character partly on Lacenaire’s own memoirs and writings.
His legend travelled far beyond France. Dostoyevsky was fascinated by Lacenaire, and his crimes and ideas are widely considered an important influence on “Raskolnikov”, the murderer-protagonist of “Crime and Punishment”.
And perhaps that is what makes Lacenaire so perfect for Children of Paradise: a real-life criminal who understood that crime, like theatre, could also be a performance.
CHARLES, DUC DE MORNY
The character of Comte Édouard de Montray was directly inspired by Charles, Duc de Morny, an illegitimate son of Queen Hortense, half-brother of Napoleon III and one of the most influential figures of the Second Empire. A politician, businessman and society figure, Morny moved effortlessly through the worlds of power, money and privilege. He was, in many ways, the perfect model for Montray: aloof, wealthy and accustomed to treating people as things to be acquired.
But there was much more to Morny than aristocratic entitlement. In 1832, he took the young Eugène Delacroix with him on a diplomatic mission to Tangier. The six-month journey through Morocco profoundly influenced Delacroix and inspired works that would shape his art for years to come.
Morny also had a hand in launching Sarah Bernhardt’s theatrical career. When her family was deciding what she should do with her future, he suggested that she attend the Paris Conservatoire. Advice that ultimately set her on the path to becoming one of the greatest actresses of her age.
So while Children of Paradise gives us Montray, the real Morny was a rather more intriguing creature: political operator, aristocrat, patron of the arts and theatrical kingmaker, with a talent for being wherever influence was happening.
