Marcel Carné Revival at Film Forum Treads an Unsteady Line Between Comedy and Drama

Film Forum is touting its revival of Marcel Carné’s “Port of Shadows” (1938) as “a landmark of poetic realism.” A casual movie-goer could be forgiven for thinking the movie is just French. Forget the setting (a studio-bound Le Havre) or the language (le français bien sur), Carné’s picture is suffused with a strain of existentialism that is as pungent and pure as a wedge of Camembert. What, then, is poetic realism? As the moniker implies, it’s a forum for human dilemmas altered and amplified by romance. The grit, grime and gumption of working peoples were, if not ennobled, then transformed into a species of melodrama. Tough guys, cool gals, and soft hearts were put through the wringer of ineluctable historical forces. Drape it all in soft focus chiaroscuro and lives of quiet desperation are rendered lyrical.“Port of Shadows” is a ripe piece of filmmaking whose trajectory is as tragic as it is foreordained. Based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan — a sometime pornographer likely best remembered as a writer of chansons — Carné’s picture was adapted by Jacques Prévert, a poet who put his hand to a few screenplays, including what many consider the director’s masterpiece, “Children of Paradise” (1945). As a poet, Prévert possessed a rueful sense of fate leavened by comedy; as a screenwriter, he helped funnel that worldview into piercing wisecracks and deadpan ironies. When a character opines about how “some people go fishing or hunting or go to war. Others commit crimes of passion. Some commit suicide. You have to kill someone,” the local barkeep drably responds: “That’s life.” Elsewhere, a hulking bear of a man laments how “it’s horrible to love like Romeo when you look like Bluebeard.”That line is uttered by Zabel (Michel Simon), a shopkeeper with highflown tastes in music and a secret or two that he’d prefer to keep on the downlow. He’s among a raft of low-lifes who end up, sooner or later, at a ramshackle bar that teeters at the edge of the shoreline. The place is run by Panama (Édouard Delmont), a lachrymose raconteur sporting a jaunty hat and a white suit who plays host to a revolving cadre of painters, prostitutes, drunkards, and gangsters. A stray gunfight is a regular occurrence at this not-so-festive watering hole. Among those who amble into the premises is a soldier on the lam, Jean (Jean Gabin). Alternately mercurial and brimming with charm, Jean is evasive about himself, his military experience and his plans, though the latter are put into some focus when he encounters 17-year-old Nelly (a radiant Michèle Morgan). She’s despondent about a missing suitor, pursued by a pasty-faced thug, and uncomfortable around her guardian, the aforementioned Zabel. No one is what they seem in this dingy burg, but each of them is, to one extent or another, a model of moral bankruptcy.Poetic realism would seem to posit a balance between antipodes, but Carné soon enough scuttles any pretense to naturalism. Treading an unsteady line between comedy and drama, he indulged and, in retrospect, codified a number of dramatic conventions, among them the lovable drunk, the whore with a heart of gold, and the tough-talking wise guy. “Port of Shadows” is an artifice whose rough edges are never as rough as they intend to be.

Marcel Carné Revival at Film Forum Treads an Unsteady Line Between Comedy and Drama

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