Le Rendez-vous des quais (1955) - film review

Marseilles, 1953.  Robert Fournier is a young dock worker who wants to marry Marcelle, an employee in a biscuit factory.  But times are hard and the couple are unable to afford an apartment, so they have no choice but to go on living with their parents.  The war in Indochina provides the port with the bulk of its work.  Incoming boats deliver coffins and wounded soldiers.  Those that embark are laden with more weaponry, more tanks, more instruments of death.  En masse, the dock workers decide to take a stand against the war by calling a strike.  Robert is lured away from his union commitments by the promise of an apartment.  He becomes a scab, and risks being alienated by his brother, his friends and the woman he loves...

Le Rendez-vous des quais is possibly the most remarkable French film of the 1950s.  In a decade that saw French cinema pass through a phase of stale uniformity, with little to distinguish one picture from another, this film stands out as something unique and deliriously refreshing.  An engaging social drama that honestly confronts the main preoccupations of its day, the film has a raw documentary feel that makes it virtually indistinguishable from Italian neo-realism.  Shot entirely on location, with non-professional actors, natural lighting and groundbreaking handheld camerawork, it boldly prefigures the early work of the French New Wave.  Had the film been widely seen in the mid-1950s as intended, it would have undoubtedly spearheaded a revolution in the art of cinema, and not only in France.  It may even had some impact on the political landscape of the time, perhaps allowing Algeria to gain her independence with far less bloodshed.  Instead, such is the wisdom of the ruling elite that the film was consigned to an early grave, sent into oblivion by an over-sensitive French government which saw the film as too dangerous to be shown.

This was the first of three feature-length films to be directed by Paul Carpita, the son of a Marseilles dockworker who, a teacher by profession, never considered himself more than an amateur filmmaker.  In 1943, aged 21, Carpita had served in the French resistance and later became a fully paid up member of the Communist party.  After the war, having acquired a taste for filmmaking, he founded the Cinépax group and shot a series of documentaries about the working class people of Marseilles.   Carpita’s left-wing political leanings are evident in Le Rendez-vous des quais, which portrays union members as modest self-sacrificing heroes and bosses as manipulative villains who will sacrifice any principle for a quick profit.  The French riot police (CRS) are depicted not as impartial law enforcers but as quasi-Fascist bullyboys, the tools of an intolerant and unjust State.  The film’s commentary on the war in Indochina is no less compromising.  One sequence depicts scores of coffins containing fallen soldiers being unloaded from cargo ships at the port, a powerful statement of the true cost of warfare.

Predictably, the Censor (acting on behalf of or at the behest of the French government) deemed the film to be far too inflammatory to be seen by the average Joe and an outright ban was issued as soon as the film was released in 1955.  After the film’s first public screening in Marseilles, all prints of the film were confiscated by the police and subsequent showings prohibited, as the film was considered a threat to public order.  Long after the film was thought to have been lost forever, a set of reels was discovered by chance in 1988, in the film archives of Bois d’Arcy, a small town near Versailles.  The film had its first authorised release in 1990, thirty-six years after it had been shot, and was widely acknowledged as a revolutionary masterpiece of its time.  This belated success encouraged Carpita to make his second film, Les Sables Mouvants (1996) at the age of 74, from a script he had written in 1958.

Le Rendez-vous des quais was not the first social realist drama to be made in France but it is most probably the first film of this kind to be shot in a completely naturalist manner without regard to the sensitivities of the Censor.  Had Carpita been a professional filmmaker, rather than an enthusiastic amateur, he would have known that the State would never have allowed the film to be shown.  The war in Indochina had been a costly national disaster and was about to be repeated nearer to home, in Algeria.  In addition, the French government feared the power of the unions and would never have countenanced a film which showed them scoring a moral victory over the bosses.  Carpita’s integrity came at a cost, since the film’s sequestration robbed him of the enthusiasm and resources to continue making films.  Although recognition came to him very late in his life, Carpita is now considered to be the perfect embodiment of film auteur and an inspiration to future maverick filmmakers who have the guts to tell it as it really is.

© James Travers 2010

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