Hôtel du Nord (1938)

Hôtel du Nord is a French romantic film drama first released in 1938, directed by Marcel Carné.  The film is based on a novel by Eugène Dabit and stars Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, Arletty and Paulette Dubost.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


One evening, two young lovers, Renée and Pierre, check into the Hôtel du Nord in Paris, near to the Canal Saint-Martin.  Unable to find work and haunted by their past, they have made up their minds to commit suicide together, hoping to be reunited in Paradise.  But at the fatal moment, Pierre cannot bring himself to turn the gun on himself, so having wounded Renée, he flees in a panic.  The gunshot is overheard by Monsieur Edmond, a pimp who lives in an adjacent room with his prostitute Raymonde.  It is Edmond who saves Renée by rushing her to hospital, where she makes a miraculous recovery.  Renée later returns to the scene of the drama and persuades the hotel proprietor to give her a job.  By this time, Pierre has handed himself over to the police and is languishing in prison.  When Renée visits him, he callously rebukes her and tells her she should forget him, something that Renée feels unable to do.  One man who might offer Renée a fresh start is Edmond, who finds himself drawn to her.   When he learns that some old enemies are in the neighbourhood and intent on revenge, Edmond decides to go far away and begin a new life with Renée.  Alas, Renée can think only of Pierre...

Adapted from the popular 1929 novel of the same title by Eugène Dabit (an emblematic figure in French proletarian literature), Hôtel du Nord is the second, and arguably bleakest, of the three poetic realist masterpieces directed by Marcel Carné in the late 1930s.  Although it is generally less well regarded than the other two films in the cycle - Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939) - it evokes more powerfully the prevailing mood in France at the time: the disillusionment with the failed Popular Front government and growing pessimism over the future for a Europe that was drifting inexorably towards war.  A sense of despair and hopelessness hangs over the protagonists of this film and we see what they see: a past strewn with broken dreams, a future devoid of meaning and a present that is unbearable.  The film’s darkly allegorical significance has an almost prescient dimension if we equate Pierre’s cowardly failure to conclude his suicide pact with France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany in 1940 and Renée’s eagerness to elope with Monsieur Edmond as France’s submission to an occupying power.  The acts of cowardice and treachery that propel Hôtel du Nord towards its dramatic conclusion would be played out for real across France in the years that followed, driving the country deeper into the abyss and leaving scars that would rankle for at least a generation.  It is as if this film is a mirror in which we glimpse not only France’s present woes but also the misery and shame of its immediate future.  No wonder the film was banned during WWII.

What sets Hôtel du Nord apart from Carné’s other poetic realist films is its profound sense of cynicism.  With its grotesquely sordid realism and almost unremittingly bleak assessment of human nature, it has more in common with Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), which is perhaps not surprising as these two films were scripted by Henri Jeanson (Carné’s usual writing partner, Jacques Prévert, was otherwise engaged at the time).  It is not fate, a tragic conspiracy of circumstances, that determines the outcome for the protagonists, but their own human failings.  The film’s one tragically fated character is not taken by surprise when death comes knocking on his door; rather, he embraces it as the only way to escape his troubles, although the events that led to this are the result of contemptible human frailty (Pierre’s cowardice, Renée’s inconstancy and Raymonde’s vindictiveness).  The poetic realist aesthetic has often been likened to classic American film noir, but Hôtel du Nord is assuredly the one poetic realist French film for which the equation is entirely justified.  From the doom-laden opening to the shocking cordite-scented climax, this is a film that perfectly captures the style and ethos of film noir at its purest.     

The central theme is one that will be familiar to any film noir aficionado.  As ever, the main characters are outsiders who are desperately seeking escape from a troubled past.  They become caught up in a romantic entanglement which leads ineluctably to a tragic outcome.   Bizarrely, the film opens with what feels like the classic ending to a film noir melodrama - a pair of lovers driven to despair (by circumstances that are not yet apparent) check into a grubby hotel with the intention of killing themselves.  This suicide is not the denouement however, but rather the overture to a far more complex noir-flavoured saga of love, betrayal and death.  With much of the drama taking place at night, the visual noir motifs are readily apparent, most notably the huge blocks of inky darkness that drape the sets, a looming hungry emptiness that threatens to swallow up the protagonists.  Even for an era in which French cinema was noted for its grimness (a stark contrast with the Technicolor extravaganzas being blithely churned out in Hollywood), this one feels particularly cruel and cheerless.  You can easily imagine the cinema usherette handing out suicide pills in the interval instead of ice cream.   

With its ambitious set designs and stellar cast, Hôtel du Nord was one of Marcel Carné’s most prestigious films, and certainly one of his most expensive.  Central to the film is its setting, its titular hotel situated on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris.  As it was not possible to shoot the entire film at the real location, set designer Alexandre Trauner was tasked with building a full-scale replica at Billancourt studios.  The set was the largest and most elaborate that had ever been constructed for the studio and became a tourist attraction in its own right.  The enormity of the set allowed for some strikingly fluid camerawork, which contributes a great deal to the realism and oppressive mood of the film.  Although the canal set is convincing enough to be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, it has a subtly unreal organic quality, unnaturally idyllic during the daytime, and threateningly claustrophobic during the night.  In the nocturnal sequences, helped by Maurice Jaubert’s demonically eerie score, the set acquires a malevolent aspect and resembles a monstrous trap.  There is something deeply unsettling in the way that the set, a static construction, so vividly reflects the complex dual nature of the main protagonists.

Whilst Hôtel du Nord impresses with its mise-en-scène, writing and design, the one area where it particularly excels is the acting, a testament to the quality of the cast that Carné was able to assemble.  As the upwardly mobile pimp and gutter whore with a grudge, Louis Jouvet and Arletty form one of French cinema’s most iconic pairings, their darkly comedic tussles providing the film with its few moments of light relief.  "Atmosphère! Atmosphère!  Est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’Atmosphère?" squawks Arletty, rebuffing Jouvet’s macho insensitivity with possibly the most famous line in French cinema.  Jouvet had previously worked with Carné on the black comic masterpiece Drôle de drame (1936); Arletty would feature prominently in four of Carné’s subsequent films: Le Jour se lève (1939), Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), Les Enfants du paradis (1945) (her most memorable role) and L’Air de Paris (1954).  The film’s romantic leads are played by Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont, who had previously been cast as the star-crossed lovers in Anatole Litvak’s classy WWI melodrama L’Équipage (1935).  Although Aumont is sidelined for much of the film, his performance is the most creditable, outshining even Annabella and Jouvet with his highly poignant portrayal of a wreck of a man who is overwhelmed by his own sense of failure.

The supporting cast is also pretty distinguished, including such familiar character performers as Jane Marken, Paulette Dubost and Andrex.  Any self-respecting French film enthusiast will have no difficulty recognising the magnificent Bernard Blier (despite the full head of hair) in one of his earliest film roles - here, as he salivates over Arletty, he looks creepily like a half-starved wolf contemplating a succulent little poodle.   Making his screen debut is a young François Périer, who would soon go on to become one of France’s most acclaimed actors of the stage and screen.  With such a bevy of high class acting talent, directed with unwavering panache by one of France’s greatest film auteurs, how could Hôtel du Nord fail to be one of the all-time classics of French cinema?  Not only is this a great film, a powerful study in inadequacy and failure, it also offers a fascinating, indeed harrowing, insight into the state of mind of the French nation in the late 1930s, giving some clue as to why the wartime years that followed would prove to be so traumatic.  If you lose faith in yourself, what is there to hope for?  The Hôtel du Nord is the place that we most fear ending up at.

© James Travers 2011

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