Illicit Attachments: The Clandestine Cinema of Marcel Carné

Marcel Carné’s (1906–1996) reputation is so tied to the notion of French poetic realism that it can obscure the sharpness and lack of sentiment that underwrite his best films. Beginning as a critic before apprenticing under Jacques Feyder, Carné moved quickly from technician to defining voice of late-1930s French cinema.

His early collaborations with screenwriter Jacques Prévert – Drôle de drame (1937), Le quai des brumes (1938), Le jour se lève (1939) – established a distinctive mood: stylised studio worlds populated by workers, drifters, petty criminals and romantic fatalists who, echoing the impending catastrophe unfolding in real-world Europe, can see disaster coming but press forward anyway, unable and perhaps even unwilling to avoid it.

Carné’s postwar films extended the sensibility established in his celebrated prewar work. The settings and social textures shifted, but the underlying attention to atmosphere, performance and mood remained constant. The tone of these later works – such as Thérèse Raquin (1953) and Les tricheurs (1958) – was, however, noticeably different, almost as if the romance of romanticism had itself faded.

After the carnage of World War II, the fatalism became cleaner, the worldview a little sharper. There’s also a subtler continuity: Carné’s sensitivity to a desire that moves obliquely and to connections defined by glances and coded affinities. His open but discreet homosexuality never announces itself in the films, but it leaves a trace in the way he frames outsiders and illicit attachments, shaping emotional currents that run just barely beneath the surface.

This season offers a carefully selected taste of works from both key periods of Carné’s career, bridged by his wartime masterpiece Les enfants du paradis (1945), the film that most effectively and poetically communicates Carné and Prévert’s faith in artifice as a key to revealing emotional truth.