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  • 'Le Quai des brumes' de Marcel Carné by Thomas Pillard
  • Keith Reader
'Le Quai des brumes' de Marcel Carné. Par Thomas Pillard. (Contrechamp.) Paris: Vendémiaire, 2019. 137 pp., ill.

Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert's 1938 masterpiece, Le Quai des brumes, must rank among the most downbeat and consistently mournful of French films, or indeed of works of art tout court—on a par with Jude the Obscure or Schubert's Winterreise. This is generally, and accurately, ascribed to the pervasive atmosphere of defeatism in France at the time it was made. Thomas Pillard takes full, and well documented, account of this, but also situates the film in a broader cinematic and cultural context, in which German expressionism and the American film noir play an important part. I was intrigued to learn that there were plans to shoot the film in Berlin, allegedly, if unverifiably but all too plausibly, vetoed by Goebbels. The often artisanal and collaborative structures of French filmmaking at the time—'un art d'équipe' as Pierre MacOrlan, author of the source novel, put it (quoted p. 20)—are invoked to explain the film's oscillation 'entre culture de masse et culture savante' (ibid.), and the great merit of Pillard's study is its positioning of Le Quai des brumes at the intersection of the two. A key concept here, not least because one forged by MacOrlan himself, is that of the 'fantastique social', implicitly privileged by Pillard over the commoner 'réalisme poétique' because of its foregrounding of the film's socio-political dimension. Pillard's intertextual frame of reference is broad and stimulating, spanning not only other French films of the time (as when Le Quai des brumes is seen as a negative counterpoint to Julien Duvivier's 1936 La Belle Équipe, also starring Jean Gabin) but the looming importance, in the crisis-torn French society of the time, of American gangster culture (epitomized by Lucien (played by Pierre Brasseur)), anti-Semitism (Zabel (Michel Simon), surely among cinema's most loathsome yet pitiable specimens of villainy, is unmistakably connoted if not explicitly designated as Jewish), and a pervasive crisis of masculinity which spares none of the main male characters. Zabel's abjection and Lucien's cringing when slapped by Jean (Jean Gabin) exemplify this, to which Jean offers a characteristically tender-yet-rugged exception until he is shot in the back by Lucien. The ethereality of Nelly (Michèle Morgan), for Pillard 'désexualisée et [End Page 511] désincarnée' (p. 109), chimes all too well with this etiolated world, though I wonder if Pillard's view of Nelly at the end, a young woman left alone in a murky port city ('elle perd […] son oppresseur et conserve la vie', p. 94), is not a trifle sanguine. This work deserves to be read by all those who study and teach this film. [End Page 512]

Keith Reader
ULIP
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