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Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)

  • Director: Marcel Carné
  • Year: 1945
- It's impossible to imagine what it would be like to be in France, bruised and battered, at the eve of its liberation from the Nazis, and to see this impossibly beautiful and poetic film celebrate life and love. There is so much that could be said about this excellent film, but for me this goes to show how so many directors, including Renoir no less, make their best films when they break out of the strong but "comfortable" film-making modes they had been accustomed to. This is almost certainly untrue, but I could so easily imagine Carné, observing how his genre of "poetic realism" had been adapted by America to tell mastercrafted but relatively empty stories about moral failings, and decided that he needed to show the world a little pure beauty. This film succeeds at that, and in our modern times it shines even more brightly.

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