Le Jour Se Leve (1939)

 Marcel Pagnol's "Le Jour Se Leve"

After watching my third Marcel Carne film, 1939's "La Jour Se Leve," it became clear to me that Carne is a very bleak filmmaker. In all three films I've seen of his, "Port of Shadows," "Hotel du Nord," and this film, there has been a bleak atmosphere in which characters harbor depressive outlooks and even commit suicide. "Le Jour Se Leve" is one of the final films in the French poetic realist movement, and perhaps one of the strongest. It also is perhaps the film that captures the depressive anxiety over the impending Nazi invasion and the overall sense of doom felt by the French populist. 

The film stars iconic French actor Jean Gabin as Francois, a foundry worker who begins the film by killing a man in his apartment complex. After police arrive, Francois locks himself in his apartment and the subsequent larger portion of the film visually displays his reminiscing over how he got himself in this predicament. After meeting and falling in love with a florist named Francoise, he learns that she has secretly been seeing another man. This man, Valentine, is a narcissistic and manipulative dog trainer who puts on dog shows with his assistant, Clara. In defiance of Francoise, Francois begins a relationship with Clara, only to continue going back to Francoise. He asks Francoise to break it off with Valentine, which she does. In a fit of rage, Valentine arrives at Francois' apartment to kill him, only to torment him instead. In this torment, Francois shoots and kills him. Once we are finally brought back to the present moment, Francois commits suicide just before his community members throw tear gas in his apartment to get him out.

On top of the utter despair and dread permeating the film, it is also important to note the economic and social situation of all of its characters. Francois is a foundry worker who spends day after day doing tough manual labor. He gets little sleep and is exhausted and fatigued all the time. Francoise is a lowly florist. Valentine is a small time dog trainer and Clara his assistant. All of the characters are in economically destitute situations. Their behavior throughout the film reflects their sense of desolation and isolation, as they continue to pine for each other's affections and attentions. There is a sense of desperation in the atmosphere in the film, in which the characters seem to satiate their loneliness and isolation at any cost. Strangely, this seems to create inherent tension, as characters continually make decisions to pursue someone that inevitably hurts someone else. They continually create the conditions that make them isolated by hurting and pushing each other away, only to continually come right back to the same lonely sense of despair from which they started from.

This 'return to despair' is perhaps one of the central themes of the film. Valentine even remarks on it, telling Francois that he will always end up right back where he started, going round and round like a spinning wheel. The characters are thereby trapped, unable to escape their desolation. Any hope they have will turn back into despair. And sure enough, in the end, they all end the film completely alone and lacking any sort of connection or love that they tried so desperately to attain throughout the whole film. That is, two characters end up dead and the other two end up completely alone. 

"Le Jour Se Leve" is a completely bleak picture of a contemporary France. I felt as though I preferred the equally dark "Port of Shadows" to this one. However, "Le Jour Se Leve" continues to exemplify the poetic realism at the heart of French cinema in the 1930s. Carne's brushstrokes contains so much darkness and fogginess that can only be considered proto-noir retrospectively. It is evident that these structures present in the film would go on to be used for the foundational structures that American filmmakers would copy. The visually expressionistic darkness of the film which expresses its despairing subjects, the end tragic fate being completely known to the viewer from the beginning, and the protagonist chasing something that he ultimately never attains.