Juliette ou La clef des songes (1951) - film review

Having been caught stealing money from his employer to pay for a holiday with his girlfriend Juliette, Michel finds himself in a prison cell.  He falls into a deep sleep and awakes to find the door of his cell open.  Stepping through the doorway, he finds himself in the most beautiful sun-drenched countryside.  A peaceful country road leads him to a remote village whose inhabitants have lost their memory.  Husbands and wives no longer recognise one another but everyone seems to know Juliette when Michel enquires about her...

Juliette ou La clef des songes is probably Marcel Carné’s most underrated and misunderstood film, but it deserves to be rated as one of his most inspired and poetic.  The film was conceived in 1940, but could not be made at the time because of fears over Nazi censorship.  After the success of La Marie du port in 1949, producer Sacha Gordine gave Carné free reign on his next film, and so the director chose to return to the dreamlike idyll he had planned to make a decade earlier.  

This is a hauntingly allegorical film that has something of the spellbinding lyrical quality of Jean Cocteau’s Le Belle et la bete (1946).  Its unsettling sense of unreality sets it apart from virtually all of Carné’s other films, most of which are anchored in the grim reality of the present day.  The theme of the film is a bitterly ironic one – that the memory of a romantic entanglement endures long, long after the actual experience of love has passed.

Whilst all of our experiences in the physical world are transient, fleeting events that are over in an instant, the memories endure like indelible words chiselled in marble, to comfort and torment us in equal measure.  "Are we happier with or without our memories?" the film asks, both lamenting and celebrating the fact that we can remember our past.  It leads us to consider that perhaps the true reality of human experience may not lie not in the sensual world of disease, hunger and spurious pleasures, but in that other, happier world, the world of our dreams.

© James Travers 2008

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