The Gates of the Night (1946)

 Marcel Carne's "The Gates of the Night"


As much as I hate to say it, this will be the last film I watch that was written by French scriptwriter Jacques Prevert. I have been such a fan of Prevert-penned films. His collaborations with Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, and Jean Gremillon have produced some of the greatest French films of the 1930s and 1940s. There's something so magical about a Prevert story - an ensemble of characters all tragic in their own way. With director Marcel Carne, Prevert scripted a piece that centered on a contemporary France coming out of the hue of the war, lost and alone. The film is 1946's "The Gates of the Night." 

"The Gates of the Night" features an ensemble of characters in Paris in winter of 1945, just after France's liberation. A member of the French underground, Jean, reunited with one of his comrades, Raymond, whom he believed to be dead. After starting a liaison with Malou, the two spent the night together traversing the town, all underscored by extreme and dramatic events stemming from a Nazi sympathizer's descent into desperation and desolation. 

What I love about a Prevert script, especially with the expressive direction of Carne, is just how poetically bleak and fatalistic the entire story can be. Emerging from the fog of war, France is in a state of paralyzed malaise. Our protagonist Jean enters Paris in the beginning of the film, spends time with a beautiful girl who is willing to run away from her husband to be with him, but is ultimately let down by the entire ensemble of characters' complete self destruction. The characters do nothing but tear each other down and in the end, kill each other literally. Jean leaves Paris the same way he came in but this time, not filled with the same sense of hope as before. He is now hopeless. There is no satisfaction to be found. It is a tale of torment, of hatred and spite that becomes all-consuming and inescapable. What could have been a film that seems hopeful about the future after the victory of war is instead a bleak and desolate outlook of a future full of the destruction of ourselves and the people around us. 



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