Les Enfants du P.

Funny how tastes change, or maybe it's just that I am a freak. I saw Les Enfants du Paradis last night in a bid to educate myself about French film. In the latest edition of Champs-Elysees there is an item on Jacques Prevert, who wrote the screen-play. Apparently the film is regarded as so monumental that it is on UNESCO's world heritage list (whatever that is). What is wrong with me? I watched it, and I loathed it. OK -- I can see that it was an amazing achievement, put together in the war and all that, and the street scenes are certainly bursting with life. I dare say the camera work is extraordinary, and that at the time it was a groundbreaking piece of work, France's answer -- so they said -- to Gone with the Wind. Surely one has to be honest though, and admit that at 60 years distance this kind of film may be a historical curiosity, but it is virtually unwatchable. The so-called poetic script seems stilted and self-conscious. It may be Prevert's finest, but it did nothing for me. The delivery of the actors is ludicrously over-the-top, every sentence ending in a sententious drawn-out vowel. This is how classical actors spoke (the equivalent of the clipped English tones of Brief Encounter). It was admired at the time, but now it is simply unnatural. Equally lacking in any passing connection to real life are the plot and the characters. Their behaviour is utterly unbelievable. The love and the passion are obviously matters of life or death, because that is what they keep telling us, but their actions feel artificial. The true cinema critic will say I am missing the point. Of course it is not meant to be naturalistic. This was cinema born of classical theatre, and the conventions had to be observed. Fair enough -- but the awful stiffness of it all is not just in my imagining. A few years after Les Enfants du Paradis was made, the film world was in rebellion against what I have just described. The Nouvelle Vague was a reaction to precisely this kind of parodic classicism. Perhaps I am just a cultureless yob, but I really think this is emperor's new clothes territory.