Marcel Carné by Jonathan Driskell (review)

This monograph could hardly be more timely, its publication coinciding with a lavish exhibition devoted to Les Enfants du paradis at the Paris Cinémathèque (October 2012–January 2013) and the issue of a new, restored French DVD edition of the film (Second Sight Films, 2012). After a long period of underestimation, connected undoubtedly with the Cahiers du cinéma critics’ effective dismissal of Marcel Carné as Exhibit A in the rogues’ gallery of cinéma de qualité, the director’s pre-war œuvre is at least now more judiciously evaluated, with gendered and star-studies approaches (as in the work of Edward Baron Turk and Ginette Vincendeau respectively) playing a significant role in this shift. The problem with discussing Carné as an auteur is the perceived tailing-off of his work after the end of the Second World War and of his partnership with Jacques Prévert, as a result of which many of the later films are difficult or impossible to view. Jonathan Driskell, in only the second English-language monograph on the director and the first for upwards of twenty years, contributes appreciably to a fleshing-out of Carné’s later career, by way of succinct but well-contextualized analyses of his less familiar films. He grasps the bull of Carné’s fluctuating critical reputation firmly by the horns, attributing it at least in part to ‘his decision to continue making films under the Nazi Occupation’ (p. 1), and offers an erudite and well-documented overview of his work. He is particularly persuasive in attributing Les Enfants’ iconic place in French cultural history to ‘the significant popular appeal it had in 1945’ (p. 69). The book is, alas, marred by a periodic tendency towards what I would describe as ‘messageitis’, as with the assertion apropos Les Visiteurs du soir that, ‘[b]ecause the characters ultimately accept their fate and do not fight back against the Devil, they can be seen as complicit with the Occupation’ (p. 64) — a singularly inappropriate hypostatization of the cinematic text, though qualified immediately afterwards by the recognition that such allegorical readings leave much to be desired. There is a scattering of omissions: Jean-Pierre Léaud’s derision of Les Visiteurs in Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain (1973) surely called for mention; and errors: Malou in Les Portes de la nuit appears to change gender when referred to as ‘Milou’, while Jacques Becker’s Rendez-vous de juillet turns into Rendez-vous de Paris. Driskell’s comprehensiveness is not always matched by his incisiveness, as the overuse of epithets such as ‘metaphysical’ and ‘transcendent’ attest, but this monograph will be of value to all scholars, and indeed students, of French cinema.