French Cinema: Paris 36 (Fauborg 36) (2008)

I sometimes think that they only make great films in France, but of course maybe it is just that the best ones are the only ones that get exported to America ( or are chosen by my local library for its DVD collection).  This one is no exception.  This is an old fashioned musical on a French theme and used Depression-era France as a backdrop for the action.    This was a highly polished, sophistocated, and big budget production, directed by Christophe Barratier and photographed by the American cinematographer Tom Stern who has done some very well received films in the US such as "Mystic River", and "Road to Perdition".   It is kind of a love letter to the era of big time musicals of the 1930s and 1940s and its production numbers are glossy and smart.  It is unabashedly sentimental and dramatic in the spirit of American films of that era but the political and social struggles portrayed are all French, where just as in America the Great Depression was a hard and fractious time. 

  It is of course a well worn narrative track blazed in many of an old movie:  a handful of show people that are down on their luck pull a show together and hit the big time and live happily ever after, sort of.  I suspect the "sort of" helps this effort avoid being just another cinematic cliche.  And like many an American movie most of it is filmed somewhere in Eastern Europe, this time somewhere outside Prague.  Only a little of it is actually filmed in Paris, and a retro Paris is actually generated through CGI. 

Pigoil and son

The owner of a small theater, the Chansonia, somewhere in outer Paris is confronted by local loan sharks who insist on payment.  Just at the stroke of midnight while the theater is alive with a New Year's celebration, the owner shoots himself.   The result is that the theater closes and reverts to the ownership by the gangsters, chief among whom is the evil Galapiat.  Four months later Leon Blum is elected prime minister and the workers and socialists celebrate. 

Douce and Galapiat

He institutes a 40 hour work week and two weeks vacation for everyone.  In the spirit of revolution, Pigoil, the former director of the Chansonia and the former employees of the theater break into the boarded up theater and start it up again.  And things really perk up by the discovery of an aspiring actress and singer who is known as Douce.   The gangster owner, Galapiat grudgingly agrees to let them use his theater when he is persuaded to take a more benevolent and less aggressive approach to the effort.  

Matters are complex however, as complex as any Victor Hugo or Dickens novel.   Pigoil's wife has left him for a man that has a lot more money.  His young son has resorted to working as a busker with his accordion but when he is arrested for doing so, the authorities transfer custody of the child to his mother, who treacherously confiscates mail between the boy and his father.

Jacquet, Milou, and Pigoil

Jackie Jacquet, who is a clownish performer at the theater, is recruited by the gangster to perform at a Fascist meeting satirizing Jews in a thoroughly anti-semitic way.  Douce falls in love with the Jewish Milou, who is a labor organizer and something of a leftist firebrand.  Meanwhile Galapiat clumsily tries to seduce Douce by wining and dining her.

  Douce is persuaded to leave the Chansonia to dissolve in mediocrity while she pursues the big time.  Meanwhile the reclusive Radio Man, who went into seclusion after the failure of his love affair with Douce's mother, emerges from his enforced seclusion and convinces her somehow to return to the Chansonia and save the day.   As it turns out Radio Man was the composer of songs for Douce's mother who has recently died, and he has some new numbers to share with the world.  

Knowing the history of France in the late 1930's you know their world is doomed and that these characters, at so many cross purposes and with the spectre of Nazism on the horizon will not end but in some kind of horrible collision.  But somehow it resolves itself and the ending is satisfying as they always tended to be in those old musicals way back when.