Juliette ou La clef des songes (1951)
Directed by Marcel Carné

Film Review

An aborted dream

In Marcel Carné's remarkably varied post-WWII output, the one film that feels most out of place is Juliette ou la Clef des songes,  a prime example of cinéma fantastique that appears highly incongruous alongside the realist contemporary dramas that dominated the second half of the director's career.  For Carné, the film had been one he had longed to make for over a decade, following an aborted attempt in 1941 in which he worked with Jean Cocteau to adapt Georges Neveux's Surrealist stage play of the same title.  The play had left a lasting impression on Carné when he saw its first (unsuccessful) production at the Théâtre de l'Avenue in Paris in 1930, which had in the lead role Renée Falcontti, the actress who had recently played Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer's great silent film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928).  Not long after his abrupt departure from the German-run company Continental in 1940 Carné soon found in André Paulvé an experienced independent producer keen to take on his next few projects (which would include Les Visiteurs du soir and Les Enfants du paradis), beginning with what he believed would be his magnum opus, Juliette ou la Clef des songes.

The principal casting for this incredibly ambitious film was typically prestigious (Carné always sought the most talented stars he could get), with Micheline Presle lined up to take the part of Juliette and Jean Marais starring opposite her in what would have been his first major screen role.  The role of Le Personage (a.k.a. Bluebeard) was allotted to the revered character actor Fernand Ledoux, and Alain Cuny was to play the mysterious accordionist after Carné had seen him in a Jean Anouilh stage play.  The film was just about to go into production when Paulvé suddenly got cold feet and pulled the plug on it.  It seemed he was unwilling to bankroll such a lavish production when there was a high risk of it falling foul of the German censors, who might misinterpret the film's complex symbolism.  Once the project was abandoned, Carné proceeded with the less provocative and somewhat less ambitious (although still highly allegorical) Les Visiteurs du soir, the only obvious connection between the two films being the presence of Alain Cuny in a prominent role.  This film - another bold departure into cinéma fantastique - was to become one of Carné's most highly regarded films, an unqualified masterpiece of the Occupation era.

Pearls before swine

After the war, Marcel Carné's popularity and reputation as France's leading film director took a severe beating during the épuration period in which collaborators with the Nazi regime were publicly denounced and chastised.  The mere fact that Carné had signed a contract to work for Continental (which he hastily annulled not long afterwards) was enough for him to be severely censured, and this might account for the incredibly hostile critical reaction to his next feature, Les Portes de la nuit.  This film may not have been a commercial failure (it had an audience of 2.6 million) but its grim portrayal of a socially fragmented post-war France allowed Carné's detractors (mostly right-leaning bourgeois critics opposed to his populist brand of cinema) to characterise him as being out of touch with the public mood.  It would take Carné another four years (and many false starts that included the abandoned Anouk Aimée launch vehicle La Fleur de l'âge and a planned adaptation of Voltaire's Candide) before he was able to complete his next film, La Marie du port (1950), but by this time the critics had already written him off and would rarely look on his work in a favourable light again.  For the remainder of his career, Marcel Carné was routinely rubbished, ridiculed and insulted by the critics, none more so than the firebrand critics on the influential magazine Cahiers du cinéma.  Of the latter, the most destructive was a hot-headed youngster named François Truffaut, whose most significant impact on French cinema is not the two dozen films he went on to direct, but the sheer number of hard-won reputations he mercilessly trashed as a critic in his attempt to justify a theory of film authorship that has since come to be regarded as naive and woefully inadequate.

The vehemence of the critical onslaught that Carné endured from the 1950s onwards was such that every film he made after Les Portes de la nuit was immediately written off as being inferior to his earlier work and therefore having no interest to any serious student of cinema.  That this is more the result of bourgeois prejudice and cultural parochialism is at once evident when you consider the wide range of contemporary themes that Carné covered in his later films - the world of boxing (L'Air de Paris), the self-destructive youth culture (Les Jeunes loups, Les Tricheurs), juvenile delinquency (Terrain vague), loneliness in the city (Trois chambres à Manhattan) and police corruption (Les Assassins de l'ordre).  Far from being out of touch, Marcel Carné was one of the most socially conscious French filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s, and the quality of his mise-en-scène remained consistently high right through to the end.  And yet, today, Carné is remembered only for a half-dozen films he made before 1945.  The fourteen films he subsequently directed (the greater part of his oeuvre) have been mostly forgotten - such is the power and wisdom of critical opinion.
 

A film out of its time

Juliette ou la Clef des songes was the Marcel Carné film that suffered most from the hatchet job done on it by the overly opinionated critics when it was offered up to them, like a virgin in some pagan sacrificial ritual.  The film was significant because it was the first of Carné's films (excluding Hôtel du nord) where he had not worked with the esteemed screenwriter Jacques Prévert, who was widely thought to be the main artistic influence on his films. (Hôtel du nord's main screenwriter Henri Jeanson was held in almost as much high regard and his contribution to this film eclipsed that of its director in the eyes of some critics.)  Carné's abrupt rupture with Prévert in the late 1940s gave the critics the opportunity to judge him on his own merits and, naturally (being mostly ill-disposed towards the left-leaning homosexual populist) they had an easy time vindicating their negative assessment of his talents.  In 1951, a fantasy offering like Juliette ou la Clef des songes was certainly something of an anomaly, although it was released around the same time as Vittorio De Sica's no less fantastic Miracolo a Milano (1951), which had been a major critical success and ranked third on Cahiers du cinéma's Top 10 Films of the Year List for 1951.  When the film was first presented at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival it met with the most glacial of receptions.  There was no applause after its screening and Carné was virtually ignored throughout the entire event.  It did, however, come away from the festival with one accolade - the Best Music prize for Joseph Kosma.

Otherwise, the reaction in the press to the film was almost overwhelmingly damning, with most reviewers writing the film off as intolerably artificial and excessively pretentious. The film did have some notable defenders (including André Bazin, co-founder of Cahiers) but overall it proved to be a major critical and commercial failure, one of the very few films by Carné to be snubbed by the cinema-going public.  Unlike other Carné films that were originally slated by the critics but later came to be seen as masterpieces (Drôle de drame being a case in point), Juliette ou la Clef des songes never underwent this kind of positive reappraisal.  To this day, it remains one of the director's most underrated and least discussed films, even though there is a strong case to be made for it being considered one of his finest works.  From the 1950s onwards, it was not unusual for Carné's films ro receive bad reviews.  What was unusual was that the director's fantasy oddity failed so spectacularly at the box office, a rarity for a filmmaker who liked to think that, whilst he was loathed by the critics, he still had the cinema-going public on his side.  The flop was of such a magnitude that it forced Carné to abandon his next planned cinematic extravaganza, a lavish adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot.    

What makes the film's failure so surprising is that it had as its male lead the most popular actor of the period, Gérard Philipe, the most bankable star in French cinema after his image-defining appearances in Georges Lampin's L'Idiot (1946) and Claude Autant-Lara's Le Diable au corps (1947).  The problem was that whilst Juliette ou la Clef des songes had a supremely attractive cast and some impressive artistic qualities it just didn't appear to fit with the times.  The critics did have a point (at least on this occasion).  With the onset of the Trente Glorieuses (a thirty-year period of continuous economic growth in France), the film was a glaring anachronism.  Had it come out a decade earlier - when the fantasy genre was at the height of its popularity, it would most probably have ranked alongside Jean Delannoy's L'Éternel retour (1943) and Serge de Poligny's Le Baron fantôme (1943) as a masterpiece of its genre.  But in the less idealistic 1950s, a time of burgeoning prosperity and optimism, this form of romantic escapism was distinctly depassé and was of little interest to a more affluent and forward-looking generation of cinema-goer.

The aesthetics of a masterpiece

Which is a shame because Juliette ou la Clef des songes is unquestionably the most personal film that Marcel Carné ever made and, by consequence, the one that is perhaps most revelatory of his own interior world.  If you want to understand the psychology and motivations of this, the most paradoxical of French film directors, this is the place you should start. Aesthetically, it is a work of exceptional quality, even by Carné's extraordinarily high standards - as visually compelling as his rightly acclaimed poetic realist masterpieces of the 1930s, and yet startling different in tone and style.  Between the brief opening and closing segments of the film, which are laden with the same oppressive gloom of Carné's 1930s melodramas, the dream world portion has a totally different feel, lighter and wistfully oneiric - a pageant of lyrical romanticism decorously draped in humour and mystique.  The combined effect of Henri Alekan's highly expressive cinematography and Alexandre Trauner's typically lavish set designs is stunning and help to make this the most stylistically daring of Carné's films.  In its poetic style and visual impact, it ranks a close equal to that other fantasy film treasure of the period, Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la bête (which Alekan had also worked on).

Trauner had collaborated with Carné several times before this (most notably on Les Enfants du paradis, with spectacular results), but here the designer surpasses himself with some of the most remarkable set design work for any French film of this time.  Most impressive is the Narnia-like forest which seems to stretch on to infinity, so convincingly constructed and so effectively lit (with an eerie dreamlike luminescence) that you could easily mistake it for a real exterior location.  The same applies for the village square, which fits so perfectly into its Provençal-like surroundings that no one could see it is as a specially constructed set.  The wildly expressionistic interiors of the fairytale Castle are on such a grandiose scale that you wonder how Carné could ever have found the money to pay for them - an extravagance which he maintained was an indispensable part of the film.  He wanted the heroine Juliette to be completely dwarfed by her surroundings as she wanders around the Castle, to emphasise both her child-like angelic purity and her tragic role as a victim of Fate - like a tiny fly caught in vast malignant web.

Some things are best forgotten

The other film of Carné's that this most resembles is Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), and like this remarkable work it is just as laden with allegory and symbolism, subtly mocking the change in French society in the aftermath of WWII.  By setting the bulk of the film in a dreamland where everyone is condemned to live in a perpetual present, with no memory of the past, Carné and his screenwriter Jacques Viot are presumably making a wry comment on France's inability (circa 1950) to accept the terrible realities of the Nazi Occupation, instead buying into the popular De Gaulle myth that the country had been a nation of heroic resistance fighters.  In one memorable scene, a benign old charlatan habitually tells people obviously fabricated stories about their past to make them smile - we do not know this character's name but he might as well be Charles de Gaulle.  In a later scene, Juliette is so upset when Michel recounts the sad tale of his life that the young man is compelled to invent a happier fiction.  'To forget - that's the only happiness', one character remarks in the film, offering us what is possibly the aptest résumé of the French mentality towards the Occupation years.  It would be almost two decades before Marcel Ophüls would make his eye-opening documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1969) which shattered the delusions and allowed France to face up its shameful complicity in the Holocaust.

A touch of Kafka

Whilst it is broadly faithful to the core ideas and structure of Georges Neveux's original stage play, Carné and Viot's adaptation is recognisably an altogether different work and reflects other influences, most notably Franz Kafka's great novels The Trial and The Castle.  (It is worth noting that Kafka's The Castle was one of the literary works Carné had come close to making into a film during his four-year hiatus between Les Portes de la nuit and La Marie du port.)   There is an unmistakable Kafkaesque resonance in Michel's struggle to reach Juliette in a land where no one has any memory, with characters frequently leading him astray with lies, and another shady-looking individual resorting to physical violence as part of what looks like a sadomasochistic ritual when he refuses to talk about the past.  Michel's resemblance to Josef K. is most apparent in the blackly comedic sequence in which he is handcuffed to a stranger and is aggressively dragged up an ominously darkened passageway.  These sequences call to mind two memorable episodes in The Trial - the famous lumber-room scene in which two bank employees are fiercely whipped and the final chapter leading to K.'s execution.  Here, there is a quite noticeable similarity to what we find in Orson Welles's 1962 screen version of The Trial, a hint perhaps that the American director may well have been influenced by Carné's film.  The near-resemblance of Bluebeard's Castle in Carné's 1951 film to the Xanadu palace in Welles's Citizen Kane, made a decade earlier, is also worth noting - each mirrors the monstrously inflated monomania of its owner.  With its dramatic switching between a darkly oppressive real world and a dreamlike fantasy world, Juliette ou La clef des songes also has a strong connection with Cocteau's recent fantasy offering, Orphée (1950), which, coincidentally, starred Jean Marais, the selfsame actor Carné had originally chosen to play Michel in his first attempt at the film.

Visions of the eternal woman

Juliette ou la Clef des songes offers a stark contrast with the film that Carné made immediately before it - La Marie du port (1950), adapted from a Georges Simenon novel.  Carné was obligated to make this earlier film, confident it would do well at the box office, in order to persuade Sacha Gordine to back the far riskier film he would make afterwards.  La Marie du port was solidly anchored in the everyday reality of early 1950s France and showed a significant departure from the poetic realist style of the director's previous films towards a more modern form of psychological realism.  With its extensive use of real exterior locations and more naturalistic dialogue, La Marie du port is a much more modern, socially relevant work, a world apart from the doom-laden claustrophobic noirscapes of Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939).  The shift from this to the ethereal, sun-drenched dream world of Juliette ou la Clef des songes is no less dramatic, although it is worth noting that the introductory and closing segments of this film return to the expressionistically shot nocturnal urban landscape of Carné's late 1930s offerings.

In the 15-minute concluding segment of Juliette ou la Clef des songes, the real world version of Juliette (as distinct from her dream world counterpart) is virtually identical with the upwardly mobile heroine of La Marie du port - a young woman more concerned with personal and material advancement than pursuing an idealised romance.  Carné's tacit admission that his idea of the perfect eternal woman now exists only in dreams, not in the sordid reality of the modern world, is one of the most bitterly pessimistic statements in his oeuvre.  In his 1930s films, it was the possibility that such a woman existed that provided the only hope of escape (through an all-redeeming transcendent love) for his doomed heroes.  Take that away, and what is left?  Mere dreams.  Carné's compulsive interest in an idealised eternal woman is particularly paradoxical given that he was a gay man and never (as far as we know) pursued romantic relationships with women in his life.  His mother died when he was in his early childhood and the resultant lack of maternal affection he experienced in his formative years is strongly reflected in just about every film he made. 'I still always felt the absence of a mother', he once remarked, and his films are a potent reflection of this.

The insouciant, divinely pure Juliette inhabiting le Pays de l'Oubli is just one of many examples of Carné's unattainable perfect woman - the Oedipal absent mother-figure that he perhaps longed to embrace throughout his life.  Others include Nelly (Michèle Morgan) in Le Quai des brumes, Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) in Le Jour se lève and Anne (Marie Déa) in Les Visiteurs du soir.  The one noticeable departure from Carné's earlier films is the gender reversal that sees the heroine of Juliette ou La clef des songes rescued from her tragic destiny (as a victim of Bluebeard) by the pure love of her idealistic male protagonist.  This is of course only true in the dream world portion of the film.  Back in the real world, Michel ends up going the same way as the disillusioned François in Le Jour se lève, committing suicide (shown symbolically by his opening of an ominous door marked 'Danger') so that he can return to his dream world and the prospect of eternal love after he is rejected by the real Juliette in favour of a richer man who will only bring her misery.

Cast to perfection

As Juliette, Suzanne Cloutier is a particularly beguiling incarnation of Carné's recurring éternel féminin, her glowing white fairytale costume and the ghostly, halo-like lighting emphasising her angelic qualities, making her the most majestic and otherworldly of Carné heroines.  The Canadian actress, a former model for Vogue, had only recently begun her acting career, debuting in Hollywood in Irving Pichel's Temptation (1946).  At the time of making Carné's film, she was appearing on stage in Paris in a production of Orson Welles's one-act play The Unthinking Lobster, after recently completing work on Welles's fraught film adaptation of Othello, in which she played Desdemona.  Her association with Welles began when he offered her a seven year contract after seeing her in a leading role in Julien Duvivier's Au royaume des cieux (1949). Although Cloutier's subsequent screen career didn't take off as it should have done, the actress did enjoy some success as a stage actress with her future husband, Peter Ustinov.  She was never lovelier, nor more beautifully rendered on celluloid, than in Carné's film.  Her ingénue charm and intoxicating charisma, along with an unusual but appealing acting style, make her stand out as a curiously ethereal being, far more at home in the bizarre dream world of fairytale castles and woods than in the ordinary everyday world with its dreary streets and tenements.

Gérard Philipe and Jean-Roger Caussimon are just as well-cast for the principal male roles of the idealistic Michel and his sinister rival Le Personnage (soon to be exposed as the serial wife-killer Bluebeard).  (Other actors considered for the roles were Serge Regianni as Michel and Pierre Brasseur as Le Personage, with Leslie Caron originally lined up for the part of Juliette ).  Caussimon had an immense career on stage and screen, but it was for his work as a singer-songwriter in the 1970s and '80s that he became most famous, although he is perhaps most readily recognised today as Lord MacRashley in the cult classic Fantômas contre Scotland Yard (1967).  With his dominating physique and larger-than-life personality, Caussimon was a perfect choice for the part of Michel's menacing adversary, but what makes his performance so memorable is the downplayed comic-book humour he brings to just about every scene he appears in.  He is a villain who doesn't know he is a villain (all he knows is that he is a man of some importance) and there is a great deal of fun to be had from this fact.  The character has apparently read every history book that has been written and yet he can find no trace of himself.  Alas, his vast library hasn't a single work of fiction - if he did have he would be sure to come across the exploits of Bluebeard and discover his true identity.  The moral: if you want to find out who you are, don't neglect your literary studies!  The sequence showing Le Personnage chasing after Juliette in the woods, pulled along by his pet pooches, is the most hilarious in any Marcel Carné film.  After this unexpected dive into burlesque surrealism, you can only see the character as a pantomime villain, and this creates a bizarre tension when Juliette finally falls into his clutches.  The scene where she insists on seeing inside the seventh wardrobe (in which her killer intends hiding her blood-strained clothes after slaying her) is both chilling and funny.  'Is this for me?' the innocent whoops in delight.  The look on Bluebeard's face as he nods his ascent is the look of a hungry tiger eyeing up its next meal.

With his Christ-like aura of sanctity, Gérard Philipe has no difficulty setting himself up in opposition to Jean-Roger Caussimon and almost seems to enjoy parodying the role in which he was at the time becoming dangerously typecast - that of the hopelessly idealistic romantic hero.  For Carné, Philipe, with his gentle persona and slender physique, fitted perfectly his idea of l'homme doux, a new kind of male archetype that lacked the conventional masculine impulsiveness and aggression of the pre-WWII proletarian heroes (such as those portrayed by Jean Gabin).  In one of his more engaging and authentic performances, Philipe presents himself as a close cousin of Jean-Louis Barrault's Baptiste in Les Enfants du paradis, a pure romantic driven by an undying passion in pursuit of an idealised love that is always beyond his grasp.  Whereas Gabin (even in his matinee idol days) would have been completely out of place in the dream world of Juliette ou La clef des songes, Philipe looks as if he has spent his entire life here, and it is when he is seen in the darker real world that he appears strangely detached from reality.  The transition from Jean Gabin to Gérard Philipe for the role of the romantic male hero is one of the starkest indications of how much Marcel Carné's cinema had evolved since the late 1930s.  (By contrast, La Marie du port manoeuvres Gabin into the role of the bourgeois patriarch, a groove the actor would stay in for the remainder of his career.)  Far from standing still, as his detractors tirelessly proclaimed, Carné was moving with the times - although the movement was possibly too subtle, too nunanced for his enemies to see.

Yves Robert (the future director of such immense hits as La Guerre des boutons (1960) and La Gloire de mon père (1990)) makes a notable contribution as the enigmatic accordion player, who plays a similar role in the story as the character of Fate (depicted as a tramp and memorably played by Jean Vilar) in Les Portes de la nuit.  Robert's oddly likeable character symbolises Nostalgia, that mysterious influence that somehow connects us with our past even when our memories fail us.  Marcel Pagnol regular Édouard Delmont crops up in the guise of a country policeman, whose effectiveness is somewhat marred by the humorous fact that his memory span is less than a minute.  Roland Lesaffre, who had debuted in La Marie de port, makes his presence felt in one stand-out scene, as a sympathetic legionnaire who consults a palmist in a desperate bid to find out about his forgotten past.  Tragically, the character is told he has experienced nothing but suffering, and he wanders off, a forlorn and broken man - prompting the spectator to wonder if it isn't better to forget the past or invent a fictional past (à la De Gaulle) to avoid unnecessary heartache.  Lesaffre became one of Carné's most intimate friends and staunchest supporters, and he appeared in all but two of his subsequent films, turning in what is probably his finest performance in the director's boxing-themed drama L'Air de Paris (1954).

Carné's Symphonie fantastique

Of the many films by Marcel Carné that were subjected to an ill-judged, spiteful trashing by contemporary critics, Juliette ou La clef des songes is the one that suffered the most and is most deserving of a complete re-evaluation.  The fact that it was the director's most personal film, the one he had longed to make for over a decade, gives it a special place in his oeuvre, but it is a remarkable piece of cinema in addition to this.  After the challenging limitations and compromises of La Marie du port, Carné approached his next film with the passion and vigour of an artist thoroughly revitalised and determined to win back the esteem of his pre-WWII years.  His mise-en-scène is as impeccable and inventive as ever, with camera motion and lighting effects used with the dazzling flair of a true master craftsman.  There is scarcely a shot in the film that isn't exquisitely beautiful in its framing and composition, and the unashamedly eccentric nature of the plot and characters makes it one of the director's more interesting and surprising films.  For anyone doubting Carné's auteur credentials, this is a film that will surely set the record straight and makes it clear that he was every bit an auteur as Jean Renoir and Jacques Feyder.  If the culturally insular bourgeois critics of the 1950s hadn't been so blinded by their crass prejudices and so prone to the herd instinct of the lower mammals they would perhaps have seen the film in a far more favourable light - not as an out-dated piece of self-indulgence from a burnt-out director, but a sumptuously crafted parable on the limits of illusions and romantic love in the modern world.  Juliette ou La clef des songes is a pure delight that offers a welcome respite from the grimmer realities of life that Carné would return to, with a renewed sense of pessimism, for his next and possibly darkest film, Thérèse Raquin (1953).

Film Synopsis

A modest employee in a department store, Michel Grandier resorts to stealing a large sum of money from his boss, Mr Bellanger, so that he can realise his dream of taking his ideal woman, Juliette, on a long journey for an idyllic holiday.  His crime discovered, Michel soon ends up in prison, but he is far from downhearted.  Even here, in a cramped prison cell with two other convicts, his dreams of future happiness stay with him, so sure is he in his love for Juliette.  Awakening from a deep sleep Michel sees that the door to his cell is wide open, inviting him to step through.  To his amazement, Michel is no longer in a prison, but in the most picturesque sun-drenched countryside.  Following a winding country road up the hillside he finds himself in a secluded village where, inexplicably, the inhabitants have all lost their memory and live in a perpetual present.  Meeting a garrulous accordionist who remains in contact with the past by constantly playing his instrument, Michel is told that he is in the Land of Oblivion, where no one has a past or a name.  Whenever a stranger appears in the village, he is immediately set upon by the locals, who attempt in vain to extract from him some clue as to who they are and where they have come from.
 
When Michel explains he is looking for a young woman named Juliette everyone claims to know her, but the young man soon realises they are mistaken.  Juliette is indeed here, but unbeknown to everyone she is presently in the immense castle of a proud nobleman, who, like everyone else, cannot recall his own name or origins - in spite of the fact that he has a vast library stocked with books relating the history of the world.  Despite his amnesia, the nobleman is sure about one thing: Juliette is his future bride.  Before he can force her into marrying him, she escapes and takes refuge in a nearby forest where the villagers are indulging in their usual revels.  It is here that Juliette and Michel meet and discover they are in love.  Their happiness is short-lived, however, as the nobleman soon shows up, guided to Juliette by his faithful hounds.  Michel can only watch in agony as his rival whisks his beloved away in a horse-drawn carriage.  With a party of villagers, Michel goes to the Castle and discovers seven wardrobes, six of which contains dresses stained with blood.  It suddenly dawns on him that the nobleman is none other than Bluebeard, the legendary wife killer!

As the unsuspecting Juliette is about to marry the nobleman Michel makes one last attempt to bring her to her senses with an ardent declaration of love.  He is on the verge of getting through when he is suddenly catapulted back to the real world by the deafening tolling of a bell.  Waking up in his prison cell, Michel is led away and told that his sentence has been revoked after his employer withdrew the charges he made against him.  It seems that Michel owes Mr Bellanger's apparent act of generosity to the intervention of Juliette.  Encouraged by this discovery, Michel visits his beloved that night at her home, only to learn that she intends marrying Bellanger, the price she had to pay to secure the young man's release from prison.  Disappointed by this apparent betrayal, Michel runs off into the night and comes across an ominous door marked with the words: 'Entrance forbidden.  Danger!'  Without hesitation, Michel opens the door and steps through into the sunny rural landscape of his dream - the land where he knows Juliette is waiting for him.