Synopsis
Nathalie falls for Baptiste Debureau, a mime. But his heart is set on Garance, who is also coveted by Frederick Lemaitre and the Count of Montray.
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Cast
- ArlettyClaire Reine, dite Garance
- Jean-Louis BarraultBaptiste Debureau
- Pierre BrasseurFrédérick Lemaître
- Marcel HerrandPierre-François Lacenaire
- María CasaresNathalie
- Louis SalouÉdouard comte de Montray
- Pierre RenoirJericho
- Jane MarkenMme Hermine
- Gaston ModotFil de Soie
- Fabien LorisAvril
Recommendations
- 100
Time Out
Carné's film has never looked more lush. - 100
Miami Herald
Seydoux says that when the film was completed and released shortly after the end of the war, it became a symbol of freedom. - 100
Chicago Reader
A breathtaking study of the relationships between life and theater, mime and tragedy, the real and the imagined, sound and silence. It runs 187 minutes, and it's worth every one of them. - 100
Chicago Sun-Times
Few achievements in the world of cinema can equal it. - 90
Village Voice
What's left to be said about Marcel Carné's towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time? - 90
The Observer (UK)
The movie's final parting sequence, where Arletty rides away in a coach and Barrault is inexorably swept in the opposite direction by a swirling crowd, is among the peaks of romantic cinema. - 88
Slant Magazine
Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment. - 80
Time Out
Carné’s camera records rather than amplifies the emotions: you can’t help but wonder what magic a René Clair, a Max Ophüls or a Jean Renoir would have found in this material. Its clamorous closing shot – which suggests, but doesn’t show, tragedy – is one of the greatest in all cinema.
