Marcel Carne Boxset - Le Quai des Brumes & Le Jour Se Leve

A double bill from the Poetic Realism stable of aesthetics: pessimistic loners with a disposition towards poetic language and events. These were made by two of its premier exponents, the writer and director team of Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné, and starring the movement's poster-boy Jean Gabin at his brooding, masculine best. Le Quai des Brumes sees Gabin's shadowy A.W.O.L soldier caught up with a mysterious girl as she traces her lover's murderer. The surrealist temperament of writer Prévert shines through in many memorably odd sequences. One particular example is a disillusioned artist's suicide: swimming into the open sea to his death to allow Gabin to take his identity. What is frustrating is that although these standout scenes make it engaging, at the same time they are tonally unbalanced with the film's noir-ish underbelly. Highly enjoyable, but not the masterpiece it is so often praised to be. However, in Le Jour se Leve, we have something genuinely special. Gabins' lowly factory worker murderers a man and then shuts himself in his one room apartment, threatening to kill anyone who tries to enter. The increasingly extreme actions of the Police in their ensuing siege are interspersed with flashback sequences of the events leading up to the murder. Some terrific character work and first rate dialogue between murderer and victim across repeated encounters draw you into the state of mind of a man on, and then over, the edge. A bona-fide classic with top billing in this feature package. [Jack McFarlane]