Marcel Carné | Hôtel du Nord / 1938, USA 1940

a large and open heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Aurenche and Henri Jeanson (screenplay, based on a novel by Eugène Dabit), Marcel Carné (director) Hôtel du Nord / 1938, USA 1940

 

Filmed between two of French director Marcel Carné’s masterworks, Port of Shadows and Daybreak, Hôtel du Nord has been seen by many critics as a lesser work—in part because Carné’s usual collaborator, writer Jacques Prévert was not available for this adaptation of a novel by Eugène Dabit. And unlike the darker and political elements of the films just before and after Hôtel, with a cast of dozens, it is far more artificed, designer Alexandre Trauner creating an entire Paris block, including moveable metal bridges along the canal Saint-Martin.

   Not that this work does not have its dark moments. The film begins, in fact, with a poor couple checking into the hotel with the intention of committing suicide, while downstairs most of the other tenants are celebrating the first communion of a young girl. Michèle, who lives in the hotel with her policeman father. She takes a piece of cake up to a woman, Raymonde (Arletty), who works as a prostitute and lives with a former thief, now her pimp Edmond (Louis Jouvet), who works on the side as a photographer.

      Among the other regulars downstairs are Ginette (Paulette Dubost), a student hairdresser, Prosper (Bernard Blier), a cuckolded locksman, Adrien (François Périer), a gay confection salesman, and the woman joyfully overseeing these and other individuals, Louise Lecouvreur (Jane Marken), the wife of the hotel’s proprietor. The one thing they almost all share in common is they are outsiders, societal outcasts who have sought out in this inexpensive hideaway one another’s company.

      As Edward Baron Turk observes in his essay for the Criterion collection:

 

“[Madame Lecouvreur’s] benevolence is also on display in the foster care she and her husband provide—to the chagrin of one xenophobic resident—for a mute youngster, a displaced, traumatized victim of the Spanish Civil War, and in her extending, quite literally, an equal seat at the table to Périer’s character, the first nonclichéd depiction of a queer male in mainstream French cinema. For Carné, who was gay, Adrien functions as simply one more self-confident social outsider in an overall project that would never have been greenlit by Hollywood’s Production Code Administration.”

      Thus we quickly meet the work’s major figures before the camera returns us to the suicidal couple in whose room, Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) has just shot his lover, Renée (Annabella), but doesn’t have the resolve to go through with his own death.

      Hearing the pistol, Edmond enters the room to see Pierre standing over what appears to be Renée’s corpse. He silently signals for the Pierre to escape before going down to report what appears to be a murder, but which the police soon diagnose as a suicide.

     In fact, Renée is not dead, but awakens to find herself in a hospital, having been given, so she is told, a blood transfusion. Meanwhile, despondent and disgusted with his cowardice, Pierre has turned himself into the police and is locked away.

     When Renée returns to the hotel to collect her things, she is given a job by Madame Lecouvreur. Working as a server, the young girl becomes quite popular with the tenants, particularly with Edmond, who girlfriend has been taken away by the police who found her papers not in order.

     Ultimately, Edmond falls in love with the new serving girl, and plans to move with her to another city, hoping to escape his dark past and the two men who have been attempting to track him down to kill him.

     The two travel away from Paris, but at the last moment, Renée—still in love with Pierre—returns to talk with Pierre in jail. Followed back to Paris by Edmond, Renée warns him not to return to his room, since there are two men waiting there.

     Edmond not only returns to his room, but tosses his gun upon the bed for one of the men to shoot him. His death, however, will not immediately be noticed since it’s Bastille day, and children below are setting off fireworks.

     Without explicitly saying it, accordingly, Carné has told a tale of dark fate and, given the general financial states of the hotel’s several tenants, presented us with a story of impoverishment. Yet this time, the director has wrapped it up in a kind of Grand Hotel-like structure that includes a great among of fascinatingly mundane and often humorous dialogue, and we are struck less by the inevitability of fate than the possibilities, particularly in the love between Renée and Pierre, to disrupt it.

     This film suggests that it is women who can redeem the future. From the early moments of Michèle’s celebration with Madame Lecouvreur at the head to the table, to our ongoing encounters with Raymonde and Renée, it is the women who, offering community and love, that keeps this little society together. If in the first scene Pierre has failed to act out of cowardice, and least he has saved them both from death; Edmond, finally, finds salvation in facing his own death. And although it may be difficult to imagine a happy ending for Renée and Pierre, she has, at least forgiven him and promised her continued love.

     If Hôtel du Nord, with its picturesque scenes and larger-than-life characters, seems, in its very perfection, a bit old-fashioned, over the year, as critic Inge Fossen has put it, the film has gained a king of lustrous patina, as its large and open hear is seldom to be found in contemporary works.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).