Directed by Marcel Carné. Starring Jean Gabin, Michel Simon, Michèle Morgan, Robert Le Vigan Club, IFI, Dublin, 91 min ifi/ie
If you think a woman can’t look amazing in a transparent plastic mackintosh, then you haven’t seen Michèle Morgan in Marcel Carné’s 1938 drama.
The garment is emblematic of the director’s most recognisably noir feature. Le Quai des Brumes, in keeping with that genre, thrives within its small budgetary parameters. Much of the action takes place within a rundown seaside bar, a setting that recalls both Vigo’s hermetically sealed micro- dramas and Aristotle’s observations about unity of place.
The director’s third feature isn’t always so tightly framed: at least one sequence is whacky and frenetic enough to anticipate Richard Lester’s work with The Beatles. Mostly, however, Le Quai des Brumes is all about the ennui, prophetic pre-Vichy fatalism and incoming Germans.
Jean Gabin (left), already a star in France following Grand Illusion a year earlier, plays Jean, an army deserter lately returned from Indochina who hails a lift on a lonely back road. He soon loses his ride after causing the driver to swerve to avoid a small dog, a beast who immediately attaches himself to our plainly jaded antihero.
An old boozer directs Jean toward a gin-soaked beach shack, a place populated by gangsters, lowlifes and lost souls. Here, an artist (Robert Le Vigan) explains his methodology: “If I see a swimmer, I immediately think he’ll drown, so I paint a drowned man.”
Soon after, the speaker takes his own life by swimming out into the waves. He leaves his clothes and passport to Jean, one of many promises or hints of a happy ending, or at least an alternative future for the world-weary protagonist and his new love, Nelly (Morgan).
It’s not to be. No film featuring so many cigarettes and philosophising drunks is ever going to end with a sunset. Jean may have a ticket for Venezuela, yet, as an obvious precursor to Bogart’s jaded trench-coats, we know he’s unlikely to leave his vulnerable teenage love to the mercies of blackmailers and sexual predators.
Le Quai des Brumes, one of Carl Dreyer’s favourite films, cast its own long, Gallic gloom across film noir and gumshoe pictures for decades. The Irish Film Institute hosts a brand, spanking, restored print all this week. Don’t miss out.
