Sous le ciel de Paris (1951) Online

It has been often mooted that the Nouvelle Vague was the Second Coming,saving French cinema from tediousness,routine,ennui,mediocrity,you name it.

So on the site n+x comments on Godard and co,and only one on this Duvivier jewel.It's when one sees such marvels one realizes all that the New Wave has deprived French cinema of:the very substance of a film,the telling of a story.And Duvivier comes first for that;here he transcends the film made up of sketches he brilliantly pioneered in the thirties with "un carnet de bal"(1937):he uses now intertwined plots with gusto,and Paris places with taste.All his characters are endearing,and he runs the whole gamut:the young girl coming from her province (Brigitte Auber who will be in Hitchcock's "To catch a thief");you're going to say it's a cliché,but wait and see,you"ll never guess what fate is in store for her,it defies conventions;the old lady and her cats (A marvelous Sylvie),trying to make ends meet;the children who find themselves back on a boat alone on the Seine ;the student who always fails(Daniel Ivernel);a sculptor gone mad;a working man,celebrating his silver wedding,and more,and more....And all that happens in the space of one day under Paris sky (sous le ciel de Paris), all these lives run into each other,or don't,making a whole,under Duvivier's magic wand.

Because magic is the only name that can describe such a treat.Orson Welles used to admire Duvivier,how I understand him!

This is a brilliant example of the kind of well-crafted Professional film that had those overgrown children at Cahiers du Cinema throwing their toys out of the pram and mounting a weak resistance via the New Wavelet that was shipping serious water within a decade.

Julien Duvivier left more Craftsmanship on the Cutting Room floor than Godard managed to include in his total output and Sous Le Ciel finds him on top of his game in the kind of multi-strand story he gave us in his classic Un Carnet du bal. This time around he concentrates on a single day, dusk to dawn in Paris and moves deftly between a group of people who may or may not have cause to remember this one day. It's arguable that Duvivier and/or his writing collaborator ex-actor Rene Lefevre (who, by complete coincidence, I saw acting in Les Musiciens du ciel less than a week ago) got the 'idea' from Norman Collins' novel London Belongs To Me, which reached the screen in the late 1940s but the characters there had in common the rooming house in which they all lived and the action spanned several months but wherever the idea originated it's adaptation is masterful.

Color would have been detrimental to this story which takes in an industrial strike where one of the characters spends the day - his wedding anniversary - on the picket line, a training hospital where a student has no problem with practicalities but sucks at passing exams, a boat ride on the Seine ending in a quarrel between the two children concerned, a photo-shoot which allows for some spectacular shots through fountains plus three people wandering the city, one old spinster who hasn't got change of a match trying in vain to scare up some food for her home full of cats, one young girl just arrived from the provinces and perhaps most significant of all the young sculptor slowly becoming manic enough to plunge a knife into a stranger. Some of these lives will connect, some will just miss, some of the characters will have problems erasing this day from their memories, some will forget it in a moment, a month or a year, but we won't be amongst them.

Sous le Ciel de Paris was the second of director Julien Duvivier's 1950 French films. The story follows the grim and bloody path trod by an unknown psycho killer. Duvivier cannily plays the film's melodrama against the glamorous backdrops of fin de siecle Paris, concentrating on a handful of people whose lives are profoundly affected, directly and indirectly, by the fugitive murder. The best vignettes feature elderly character actress Sylvie as a spinster devoted to her houseful of cats, and Brigitte Auber as a wide-eyed country lass.