I was looking for a movie that could help me understand what it was like in Europe after the war. I tried to sit down and watch Rome: Open City by Roberto Rossellini. It’s the emblematic neorealist film, breaking from the glitz of Hollywood by using documentary footage, non-actors and real locations to get across what it felt like to live under German occupation during World War II. Put into development just two months after the Allies forced the Nazis out of Rome, it’s got street cred to spare. It also kind of put me to sleep.
Open City wasn’t going to do it for me. So I looked back to my list for another movie made in Europe right after the war, and I found a doozie.
1945’s The Children of Paradise.
I’m going to tell you right up front, the movie’s French and it’s about a mime. Actually, it’s hailed as the greatest French movie of all time, and the mime in question was trained by the guy who trained Marcel Marceau. But don’t let that stop you.
Children of Paradise one-ups Open City in the WWII street cred department: it was shot under the Vichy government during the German occupation. Entire reels of the movie had to be hidden from the Vichy government, who surely would have censored the script. Resistance fighters became extras so that they could congregate in large groups, while starving background actors would make away with food meant for use as props
Also, Children of Paradise isn’t about the war, it’s about a beautiful street actress and the men who love her: a criminal, an aristocrat, an actor and a mime. The story follows them across the epic background of 19th century Paris as they seduce each other, court each other, and break each other’s hearts. It’s about yearning for people you can’t have and how that can shape everything you do, even when what you do is genuinely great.
As you might expect, the movie has a profound romantic streak, but that romanticism’s cut through with a cold realism. Characters say things like “If all couple living together were in love, the Earth would glow like the sun,” a perspective at once gloriously romantic and devastatingly cynical.
The whole movie, as lyric and dreamlike as it can get, never takes its feet off the ground, offering hope as large as happily ever after and pragmatism as certain as death. All of which makes perfect sense given that it’s a story told by the French during one of the darkest times in the history of the country.
I guess for me hopelessness never rings true, and hopelessness seems to be what “gritty realism” offers. While it may be that day to day life in Rome under the German occupation looked the way Rome: Open City looks, it’s just as possible that day to day life in France under the Vichy government felt the way Children of Paradise feels. Screenwriter Jacques Prevert and director Marcel Carne knew that when they chose to risk their lives to tell a story not about the details of the war, but about love.
While I have a hard time identifying with the complexities of war, anyone can identify with the yearning, grandeur, and devastation that love can bring. Experiencing a movie that paints emotion on such an epic scale that it can get across the feeling of a nation during wartime is just the sort of thing that can change your life.
Next week: time for some Film Noir.
