Prévert Reads Shakespeare: Lacenaire as Iago in Les Enfants du Paradis

First impressions seem to suggest little more than a casual link between Othello and the film Les Enfants du Paradis despite multiple references to Shakespeare's tragedy in Jacques Prévert's screenplay. ¹ Many glaring differences present themselves with respect to both works. The Elizabethan drama appears to have little in common with a film made and released in France during the Occupation that focuses on a troupe of actors, a petty criminal, and an aristocrat in early nineteenth-century Paris. Yet, Prévert's numerous appropriations of Shakespeare are crucial to the film's meaning. Edward Baron Turk, who mentions the film's allusions to Shakespeare, argues that "parallels" between the two narratives are "recognizable," and briefly outlines these similarities with respect to character. ² Turk rightly contends that "variants" (230) of Othello are to be found in Les Enfants du Paradis, but it is not his aim to analyze them at any great length. By contrast, my goal is to examine why Prévert chose to place such emphasis on Othello, and to probe the ways in which Prévert and director Marcel Carné both imitate and deviate from Shakespeare in order to explore issues such as character motivation, plot adaptation, and the aesthetic and historical contexts in which the film is situated.

The incorporation of Othello into the movie's structural and thematic framework allows Prévert and Carné to extend and deepen the dramatic import of Les Enfants du Paradis, as it is through Shakespeare that the picture goes beyond its primary schema as an imitation of the Harlequinade and defines itself as an exploration of pathological jealousy and obsession that culminates in fatalistic expressions of despair and destruction. ³ Space will not allow a full discussion of how Prévert's male characters Baptiste Debureau, Frédérick Lemaître, the Count Edouard de Montray, and the female lead Garance, correspond to Othello and Desdemona. The principal focus will be on Prévert's imitation of Iago through Pierre-François Lacenaire. Key scenes recast the relationship between Iago and Othello by literalizing particular aspects of their conflict. The result, in part, is an expansion of Shakespeare's drama where particular dimensions of the characters and plot which are not revealed in Shakespeare find expression in Les Enfants du Paradis. For example, one sees in Prévert an Iago who makes no effort to hide his hatred of Othello, and who enters into a directly adversarial relationship with him. Lacenaire's violent, personal "victory" at the end of Les Enfants du Paradis not only signals a departure from Shakespeare, but reflects the cynicism, if not the chaos of the era in which the film was made. The gratuitous, "anarchic" (Turk 253) havoc Lacenaire wreaks on the world he inhabits suggests in microcosm the sadistically cataclysmic forces unleashed in Europe during the mid-twentieth century. ⁴ To a degree, Lacenaire's destructiveness has a nihilistic dimension, not so much in an early nineteenth-century epistemological sense of the inability to know or believe in anything, but in an early twentieth-century sense of the alienation and exclusion of the self that finds aggressive expression in wanton violence against society. Contrary to Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus who, among others, sought in various ways to counteract the despair attendant in recognizing the "affliction" (Thielicke 54) that is the "nothingness" of life, Prévert intimates that art and intellect provide no refuge from the drive to destroy and to self-destruct. ⁵ For the purposes of this essay, nihilism will refer to the impulse to annihilate the self and/or the other that stems from a drive to assert violent authority over others in the absence of any moral or political imperative to thwart this will. From a political perspective, the nihilistic aspect of Lacenaire's character comes to mirror the situation of a divided France during the Occupation. Lacenaire displays...