Le Jour se lève (1939) - film review

François, an ordinary factory worker, barricades himself in his one-room lodgings, after shooting dead another man.   He ignores the cries from his neighbours and the police who surround him and who threaten to bring him to justice.  As night falls, François begins to recall the chain of circumstances that led him to kill another man.   It all started when he met and fell in love with a young flower seller named Françoise.  How quickly that idyllic love affair became poisoned by jealousy and suspicion.  François seemed to have everything - until that wicked dog trainer Valentin and his mistress Clara came on the scene...

Le Jour se lève is perhaps the bleakest of all French films.  A doom-laden poetic realist masterpiece, it evokes the era in which it was made more vividly than any other film and still has the power to fill its spectator with a sense of utter desolation as the final reel chugs towards its devastating conclusion.  This was the fourth collaboration of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, and easily their best after their subsequent triumph, Les Enfants du paradis (1945).  Even grimmer than Carné’s earlier gloom-fests Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Hôtel du Nord (1938), Le Jour se lève is a film that seems to be consumed by fatalistic despair and offers not even the meanest glimmer of hope as it follows a condemned man on his final journey through his barbed memories and shattered illusions.

When Carné and Prévert came to make this film, there was a prevailing mood of pessimism.  Dismal clouds of foreboding hung heavy across the continent of Europe, if not the whole world.  Many European countries had succumbed to fascism and those that had not feared that they would go the same way.  Democracy appeared to be a dying phenomenon, and as Germany put all its energies into building up its military might in a determined attempt to reclaim something of its former empire, war seemed inevitable.  In France, there was little to cheer the ordinary working class man and woman.  The Popular Front, which promised a workers’ utopia in the mid 1930s, was long since dead and buried and the present rightwing government had no time for the rights of the sweating masses.   No surprise then that the hero of Le Jour se lève, François (superbly portrayed by Jean Gabin) should be one of the hard-pressed, cynically exploited throng of work horses, a humble factory employee whose life is one of endless drudgery that ends in what looks chillingly like a state-orchestrated execution.  The cramped little room that becomes François’s prison and deathtrap is a powerful metaphor for the grimly confined lives of most working class people of the time as they became mere drones for a socio-economic system that offered them no relief, no hope of attainting a better life for themselves.  Cinema does not get much more depressing than this.

The darkly oppressive mood of the film derives principally from its near-expressionistic design and photography, which clearly show the influence of the late silent masterpieces of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang whilst presaging subsequent American film noir.  Alexandre Trauner’s striking set designs have aspects of both fairytale and grim urban realism, adding an exquisite lyricism to the film’s more romantic passages whilst starkly exteriorising the inner turmoil which consumes the hero when he realises he is a doomed man.   Curt Courant and Philippe Agostini’s proto-noir cinematography, beautifully atmospheric and unremittingly threatening, further accentuates the feeling of entrapment, the sense that events have conspired to drive a decent hardworking man to a harrowing final act of despair.   The film is also to be noted for its imaginative use of sound, which adds to the slowly building tension, culminating in the final shot in which a deathly silence is broken by the sound of an alarm clock going off, like a belated bomb.   The slow drumbeat of Maurice Jaubert’s score anticipates the drama’s terrible denouement and mockingly reminds us that in life the only way out is death.  It is ironic that this should be Jaubert’s final film score – having enlisted in the French army at the start of WWII, he would die from war wounds almost a year to the day after Le Jour se lève had its French release.

As ever, Carné’s casting choices for the film are flawless, as are the performances his actors deliver.  Jean Gabin was by this stage in his career firmly ensconced in the public mind as the working class hero, the figure with whom most cinemagoers could identify.  It is worth comparing Gabin’s portrayal of Mr Average in Le Jour se lève with his previous interpretations, in films such as La Belle équipe (1936) and La Grande illusion (1937).  Across Gabin’s early career in the 1930s there is a discernible migration away from the shallow romanticism of his early roles towards a much more complex and nuanced characterisation, which reaches its apotheosis in Le Jour se lève.  The stolidity, cynicism and pent-up inner conflict that define Gabin’s portrayal of François prefigure the roles that would predominate in the second phase of his career as the older, wearier Gabin, a man who appears to have the idealism thrashed out of him.  Gabin’s viscerally tortured portrayal in Le Jour se lève, of a man who sees his dreams cruelly shattered and is suddenly confronted with his own mortality, is among the actor’s most memorable and probably ranks as his finest.    The film also boasts superlative contributions from Jules Berry, deliciously venal as the manipulative dog trainer Valentin, and Arletty, magnificent as the archetypal tart with a heart, the role for which she was best suited.

When Le Jour se lève was released in June 1939, it met with widespread critical acclaim and was a commercial success, despite its depressing subject matter.  Predictably, however, the film was ill-thought-of by the Vichy government and was one of a number of films that was banned in 1940 for its supposedly demoralising influence on the French nation.  (Apparently, it was not France’s lack of political and military will which forced the country to capitulate to Nazi Germany; it was films like this.)   In 1947, Anatole Litvak directed an American remake of the film, The Long Night, a popular film noir which featured Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes and Vincent Price.  When they bought the rights to make this film, RKO insisted that all copies of Carné’s film be destroyed; fortunately, this agreement was not honoured and Le Jour se lève resurfaced in the 1950s, to even greater critical acclaim.  The film’s moody design and flashback narrative structure was replicated in countless films noirs in the decades that followed and, now considered one of the great classics of French cinema, it still continues to inspire film directors the world over.  Jean-Marc Moutout’s acclaimed 2011 film De bon matin is an obvious homage to Le Jour se lève, a reminder of the power that 1930s French cinema continues to exert over today’s filmmakers.

© James Travers 2011

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