Castleton International Film Festival: Le Jour Sève

This paragon of “poetic realist” cinema from 1939 was the fourth collaboration between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, who enjoyed one of the most illustrious partnerships in movie history. (They are the team responsible for 1945’s Children of Paradise, perhaps the most beloved French film of all time.) Le jour se lève begins with a jolt: An elegantly dressed gentleman, already dead from multiple gunshots, tumbles down a flight of stairs in a Paris tenement. As the police swarm the building, the man who pulled the trigger, François (Jean Gabin), barricades himself in his garret. Through puffs of countless cigarettes, François silently recalls what led to this violent act via flashback. This gruff foundry worker, we learn, was in love with two women: innocent florist Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and hardened entertainer Clara (Arletty), both of whom were attached to the devious Valentin (Jules Berry). The raging animosity between the two men led to the fatal confrontation witnessed in the film’s beginning; by its end, there will be another death. Suffused with despair, Le jour se lève, released just a few months before France and the UK declared war on Germany, uncannily anticipates the unrelenting real-life misery to come.