Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1417 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-09-18
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL, Restored
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 181 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
A film which regularly charts high in critics' polls of the best films of all time, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis is as solid a landmark in French film history as the Eiffel Tower is on the Parisian landscape. And at 187 minutes running time, it's a massy edifice indeed, built from a rambunctious cast of characters--ranging from pickpockets and prostitutes to aristocrats and actors--whose lives intersect around the Theatre des Funambules, a popular Parisian theatre on the Boulevard du Crime, during the 1840s. (The title refers to the poor who can only afford seats in the upper galleries of the theatre.)

The heart of the plot is a love story between mime artiste Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) and streetwalker Garance (the magnificent, sand-paper-voiced Arletty). When Garance is falsely accused of pickpocketing, Baptiste provides a mimed alibi for her to the police (one of the film's most famous set pieces). The rose she later throws him in gratitude sets off a romantic obsession, one of several that structure the film, as do love triangles, duels, and tortured confessions of feeling.

Thematically, Les Enfant du Paradis gnaws over typically French cinematic preoccupations: illusion and reality, the nature of performance, the indomitable spirit of the proletariat and so on, all made the more charged and poignant when you know the film was shot during the Nazi occupation. (One actor, Robert Le Vigan, was reportedly a Nazi collaborator and disappeared during the filming under mysterious circumstances and so had to be replaced by Pierre Renoir.) --Leslie Felperin

Synopsis
Filmed during the German occupation, this French milestone centers around the theatrical life of a beautiful courtesan and the four men who love her. Voted the "Best French Film in History" by the French Film Academy in 1990. Academy Award Nominations: Best Original Screenplay.

Customer Reviews

the most beautiful film of all time...
Simply lovely. A must-watch film and one of my all time favourites. It may be long, black & white, old and subtitled (to the non French speakers) but please don't let any of these put you off. It's a masterpiece!

Love is not so simple in this classic of world cinema
If you like Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables', then this film should appeal especially on a Sunday afternoon. It's a film with a brilliant, elaborate plot (particularly part 1) with the second part, set a few years later, providing the emotional culmination to Garance & Baptiste's doomed love. It is filled with an array of memorable characters - aristocrats, cut-throats, bombastic actors with big egos, the rag clothes man, Jericho, and a blind beggar who can see - spanning the broad canvas of Paris street scenes though it remains still small enough for lovers to encounter one other again.

The film revolves around Garance, the cool seductive beauty who reveals only part of herself (like the vaudeville act shown at the very beginning)and the four very different men who desire her. I think perceptive reviewers below have already pointed out how each represents a particular male aspect desiring to possess Garance completely with perhaps only Baptiste, the dreamer, able to finally offer the simple love she wishes to possess.

However, happiness, as ever, proves brief and illusory. The final scenes are great where Baptiste, the silent mime artist, cannot hide his true feelings from the tragic figure of his long-suffering wife, Natalie, as he calls out for Garance and his final desperate search amidst the throng of the carnival crowd.

A French masterpiece.
Simply the greatest French Film of all time. Made in Paris whilst Paris was still under Nazi occupation this quite beautiful Film is wonderfully cast, acted, written and directed. Many great French films can lay claim to being the greatest, but Les Enfants Du Paradis is for me the greatest of all time because it is the richest, most humane & powerful. Let the human emotions of the French Theatre it is set in and around wash over you as you marvel at the performances and the characters journey's. I can't tell you too much as that would be give away what is a gift of a Film. If you like, love or are curious about French cinema, start with this Film and you'll not be disappointed.