Magic... Les Enfants du Paradis
The Oscars, don't you just love 'em. No? Me neither. Too much noise, for starters. And although I no longer think all the best movies are silent, there's still a strong case to be made for actors keeping silent when off the set. Why, when someone's talent lies in pretending to be someone else, should they be thought interesting in themselves? But with the Academy Awards it's actors all the way: laughing, crying, air-kissing and, worst of all, talking.
Lucky, then, that those wishing to escape from the Oscar monopoly on screens of all sizes this weekend can hole up in London's National Gallery and catch, among the many non-moving images, one motion picture, one that moves to the exquisite design of no less a director than Marcel Carné.
Set in the bustling theatrical district of 1840s Paris, Les Enfants du Paradis (the paradise of the title refers to the highest and cheapest seats of a theatre, which we would call the gods) toes a rather tragic line on the contrast between actors and their art so familiar from Hollywood lives. We love actors because of the lives, loves and worlds they are able to show us; actors themselves, as Carné's monumental film illustrates, are less apt to find happy endings.
The film is also something of a lament on the passing of silence from the movies. Funambules, the theatre where the hero Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) plies his trade, represents one of the many Parisian theatres prevented by French law from staging spoken theatre. The art of mime is the order of the day, and Carné manages magnificently to make silence a metaphor for love's expression, appropriately enough given that the film was made during the war, with the involvement of numerous members of the Resistance.
Les Enfants is showing as part of the gallery's Tales From A City season, the programme somewhat loosely designed to accompany the exhibition of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's early landscapes. While not exactly at the cutting edge of retrospective programming, the season also includes two films by Renoir's son, Jean Renoir, whose masterpiece La Règle du Jeu will screen in a fortnight. (The painter's other son, Pierre Renoir, actually stepped in at the last minute to play the part of Jéricho in Les Enfants).
Often referred to as a satire on the decadence of the French aristocracy, La Règle du Jeu is too clever to give its director or viewers any stable position from which to satirise. Rather, in much the same way as Diderot's novel Rameau's Nephew, a microcosm of absurdity provides a lens through which to view human existence in its entirety, with all notions of sense and folly quietly, unsentimentally undermined. In fact, the film is much closer in form and intention to Mozart's Da Ponte operas (his music is prominent in the film) than to such seeming equivalents as, say, Gosford Park, or The Shooting Party.
Be that as it may, there are hundreds of films that have brought Paris and its environs to life in ways that remind us why cinema began here rather than in the sandy bowl out west. And bearing in mind that the National Gallery ran another Paris film season last year, suggestions for the best of them (below, please) might be just the ticket - a much-needed antidote to that brash spectacle at the Kodak theatre.
