Often referred to as the French answer to Gone With the Wind (1939) and certainly among the most beloved (if not the most beloved) of French films, Marcel Carné's gorgeous and sprawling Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis) is a lush romantic epic set against the backdrop of the theater world in 1820s Paris. Full of melodrama and intrigue, glimpses behind the curtain, dealings in seedy bars, duels to maintain honor, and characters both outlandish and deeply humane, it is dramatic filmmaking on a grandiose scale—soap opera redeemed by art.

But, more than that, Children of Paradise is also one of the great examples of artistic perseverance under the most dire circumstances. Filming commenced in 1943, and the production took more than two years as Carné and his production team labored in war-torn France beneath the occupation of the Nazis. The extravagance of the film itself plays like a willful cinematic rejection of the Nazis' oppression, as Carné triumphed in the end with his masterpiece despite shortages in film stock and funds, power outages, and the fact that two of his most significant collaborators (production designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma) were forced to work covertly because they were Jewish and being hunted by the Gestapo.

The story, written by screenwriter Jacques Prévert in the sixth of his seven collaborations with Carné, is divided into two parts, "The Boulevard of Crime" ("Le Boulevard du Crime") and "The Man in White" ("L'Homme Blanc"), which played separately during the film's initial release in 1945. Covering nearly a decade in time, Children of Paradise is set against the gay backdrop of Paris in the first half of the 19th century, an era in which the arts were indulging in romanticism and the great novelist Honore de Balzac was at the peak of his creativity (Balzac's focus on the entire human spectrum—characters from all walks of life—is replicated here in Prévert's cast of characters, which ranges from a homeless man pretending to be blind in order to get more alms, to the wealthiest of the social elite).

The story concerns a beautiful, self-reliant courtesan named Garance (Arletty) who is loved by four different men, all of whom represent different facets of what love can be. There is the dashing, carefree, and self-absorbed but lovable actor Frédérick LeMaître (Pierre Brasseur), who quotes Shakespeare and tries to pick up Garance on the street. Garance has a causal friendship with Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), a fiendish dandy who goes by many names and whose petty crimes become more brutal as the film progresses. The one man Garance ends up marrying is Count Edouard de Montray (Louis Salou), although it is clear that he loves her more than she could possibly love him. This is because Garance's heart is always with Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), a sensitive and gifted mime who is her true love. The film's tragedy is that Baptiste and Garance are soul mates who, for various reasons (some of their own making), will always be apart.

Of course, as with any epic narrative, simple plot summary does nothing to indicate what Children of Paradise is about. The characters move in and out of Prévert's richly textured narrative (which is reminiscent of 19th century literature), and it contains all the requisite elements of a romantic epic, from duels, to sudden discoveries of betrayal, to hushed scenes of intense romantic awakening. Yet, the film's vision is much broader than this, focusing as it does on the role of art in life. Carné gives great amounts of screen time to the various stage performances, which allows him to engage unobtrusively in an examination of the art of theater on two levels: Within the narrative, he shows the centrality of theater to the characters' lives, and outside the narrative, on a metacinematic level, he illuminates how film and theater are both vastly different, and yet still interconnected.

The film's tone varies broadly, covering a wide gamut of human experience. There are scenes that are enormously funny, such as Frédérick's hilarious on-the-spot reinterpretation of an awful dramatic play in which he's acting. In a self-consciously spectacular display of breaking the fourth wall, he engages the audience by stepping out of character and actively turning the play into a ridiculous farce, much to the consternation of the play's three authors (two of whom always speak at the same time). Yet, there are also scenes of great drama, such as when Lacenaire revels in literally pulling aside the curtain to reveal to Garance's husband that her heart is still truly with Baptiste. Because of the Nazi occupation during the production, there is little in the film that is overtly political. Yet its genuine populism fills the political void, allowing the film to take a strong and meaning,ful philosophical stand about the worth of human life to which the Nazi censors would be largely oblivious.

Carné stages this grand narrative in a grandiose scale befitting it, carefully orchestrating long shots of huge crowds wandering down the Boulevard du Crime with the same attention to detail that he lavishes on intimate scenes between two lovers. Yet, despite the scale, the human element of Children of Paradise is never lost; the film's genuine populism emerges in Carné and Prévert's human treatment of their characters, particularly the romantic and tragic Baptiste.

This film is generally referred to as being the height of "poetic realism," a term used by Georges Sandoul to describe the tendency in many French films of the late 1930s and early '40s to deal with "realistic" subjects in a lyrical and poetic manner. This is exactly what Carné does here on a scale larger than he had ever attempted before, which leaves one with the seemingly contradictory, yet deeply moving, impression of both reality and dream.

Children of Paradise: Criterion Collection Two-Disc Special Edition
Aspect Ratio	1.33:1
Anamorphic	No
Audio	Dolby Digital 1.0 Monaural
Languages	French
Subtitles	English
Supplements	Audio commentary by film scholar Brian Stonehill Audio commentary by film scholar Charles Affron Video introduction by director Terry Gilliam Jacques Prévert's film treatment Production design gallery Production stills gallery Filmographies for Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert U.S. theatrical trailer Restoration demonstration 26-page booklet with excerpts from 1990 interview with Marcel Carné
Distributor	The Criterion Collection / Home Vision Entertainment
Release Date	January 22, 2002
SRP	$39.95
VIDEO
The new high-definition digital transfer of Children of Paradise, taken from Pathé's fully restored 35mm fine-grain master, is a revelation. Criterion produced a laser disc set of the film back in 1991 using a restored negative, but the difference between the LD and this new DVD is extraordinary. Not only is the image brighter and sharper, but it is much, much cleaner. Using the MTI Digital Restoration System, Criterion went through and cleaned up the image immensely, removing some 30,000 visual artifacts, including dirt, debris, nicks, and scratches. Considering the film's age, there are still flaws here and there—there are a few instances in which frames are missing and, even with the digital restoration, there are some instances of damage that were to large to be fixed. Of course, most of these last for only a frame or two and are barely noticeable. Because the original negative was in such bad shape, several sections were replaced with elements from duplicate negatives and prints, which results in slightly noticeable alterations in texture and density of the image. Overall though, Criterion is to be commended for an extraordinary job in restoring this beautiful film to as close to a pristine state as it will likely ever be.
AUDIO
As with the image, Criterion has done a solid job of presenting the soundtrack in its best possible state. Presented in Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural, the soundtrack was transferred from a restored digital audio master and then further cleaned up with the Cedar Audio Restoration System. While still suffering from the general limitations of monaural from the 1940s, the sound is surprisingly rich and blessedly free of almost any pops, ambient hissing, or distortion.
SUPPLEMENTS
As the film is divided into two parts, each gets its own screen-specific audio commentary from a different film scholar. "The Boulevard of Crime" features an audio essay by the late Brian Stonehill, a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College, which was also featured on the 1991 laser disc, while "The Man in White" features an audio essay by Charles Affron, a professor of French at New York University. Both men are exceptionally well-spoken and have done a thorough amount of detailed research into every conceivable facet of the film (Affron credits much of his insight to Edward Baron Turk, whose book Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema is a must-read for anyone interested in this period of filmmaking). What is most rewarding about listening to these commentaries is the socio-historical context in which these two scholars place the film, not only in terms of its being produced during the Nazi occupation, but also its rich connections to French history and culture (almost all of the main characters are based upon or inspired by real-life historical people). As part of the "Janus Films' Director Introduction Series," director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) gives an interesting, if somewhat rambling five-minute introduction to the film on disc one. Also on the first disc is a restoration demonstration that lasts roughly four minutes and gives numerous examples of the differences between the unrestored film elements, the 1991 laser disc, and the new DVD transfer, as well as a comparison of the original soundtrack to the newly restored tracks. The second disc contains several still image galleries, including two production design galleries, one of designs by Alexandre Trauner and the other by Léon Barsacq. There is also an extensive gallery of production and publicity stills. Included as well is the embarrassing U.S. theatrical trailer (leave it up to the Hollywood Studio Era publicity machine to make such a sublime masterpiece look silly and banal) and thorough, well-written filmographies for Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert. Also included with this two-disc set is a 26-page booklet that includes liner notes by film historian Peter Cowie, brief biographical sketches of the filmmakers and much of the cast, and an extensive excerpt from an interview with Carné conducted by Brian Stonehill in 1990 for the Criterion laser disc.

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