LE JOUR SE LEVE

5/10

aka Daybreak : France 1939 : Marcel CARNE : 87 mins

Factory-worker Francois (iconic Jean Gabin) broods in his one-room attic apartment having just shot dead Valentin (seedy, hissable Claude Berry), As the police close in on all sides, Francois reflects on the events leading up to his fateful act. A month before, he’d embarked on a passionate affair with the young, sweet-natured Francoise (Jacqueline Laurent), only to find she was also apparently involved in some kind of relationship with Valentin – a middle-aged vaudeville artist, very recently split up from on-stage partner Clara (seen-it-all ‘Arletty’). Francois then got together with Clara, only to return to Francoise when informed by Valentin that the girl was actually his daughter. But Valentin was not to be trusted…

Though firmly established in the movie pantheon as, in critic Danny Peary’s words,  “the classic fatalistic melodrama”, Le Jour se Leve hasn’t aged particularly well. Several aspects retain interest – the intriguing structure of Jacques Prevert’s script (Gabin’s flash-backs tend to be two-hander scenes featuring the principals), the carefully delinated social context (with unemployment rife, Gabin is already being killed by the hazardous ‘sand’ at his factory) and, most of all, the performances: Gabin, Arletty and Berry are flawless, though Laurent is a little too wet as the relatively inexperienced Francoise. The pacing is too often distractingly slow, however, and the various aspects of the plot aren’t developed particularly well - the film isn’t quite romantic enough to be a romance, never quite dramatic enough to be a thriller, and the ‘ironic’ ending is rather ostentatiously downbeat. Like Francois, the audience must toil through rather a lot of work for relatively little reward.

2^nd March, 2003
(seen same day, Cineside, Newcastle)

by Neil Young