Le Jour se lève by Ben McCann (review)

Marcel Carné, for long the neglected giant of French cinema, has experienced a critical revival in the twenty-plus years since Edward Baron Turk’s Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)—largely, and paradoxically, the result of the paradigm shift away from auteurist to star studies and gender-based approaches. This is instanced by Jill Forbes’s book on Les Enfants du paradis (London: British Film Institute, 1997) and Jonathan Driskell’s much more recent study, Marcel Carné (Manchester University Press, 2012; see French Studies, 67 (2013), 273–74), to which the present generally admirable monograph can now be added. Ben McCann documents most thoroughly the ‘climate of collaborative filmmaking’ (p. 6) characteristic of the director’s work, and provides comprehensive accounts successively of the film’s genesis, structure, set design — of paramount importance for Le Jour se lève — performances, political context, and critical reception. The text is erudite and well written, with a decent array of well-reproduced stills. It would be difficult to better McCann’s statement that Jacques Prévert ‘brings the Poetic to Carné’s realism’ (p. 14), illustrative of the skilful balance he strikes between an auteurist and a more collaborative approach. The role of cinematographer Curt Courant receives especially welcome attention. Some possible intertextual allusions are omitted: thus McCann’s observation that the apartment block ‘can be read as a character in its own right’ (p. 42) reminded me of the Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot, while the role of the brooch Valentin gives his ‘seducees’ evokes the earrings whose circulation drives the plot of Max Ophüls’s Madame de …, and the centrality of the staircase cannot but be reminiscent of Hitchcock. There are, alas, a number of errors and misprisions, most glaring of which is the assertion that François/Jean Gabin’s cry ‘Tu vas la taire’ refers in some manner to Françoise/Jacqueline Laurent, whereas it is immediately followed by the complement ‘ta gueule’. I would question the view that François’s crime is ‘cold-blooded murder’ (p. 96) — was Gabin ever more hot-blooded? — and suspect a touch of délire d’interprétation in the suggestion that François’s name ‘behoves [sic] an allegorical interpretation of his fate, and the fate of the country’ (p. 82). The view that the ‘humbleness and spiritual peace’ of Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus ‘might be read as an extension of her [Clara’s] character’ (p. 47) signally fails to carry conviction; if Arletty were alive, she would be turning in her grave. These quibbles and caveats aside, this is a very good introduction/companion to Carné’s film. My students will certainly find it on their reading-list in the future.