Les Enfants du Paradis
| Children of Paradise | |
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 |
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| Directed by | Marcel Carné |
| Produced by |
Raymond Borderie Fred Orain |
| Written by | Jacques Prévert |
| Starring |
Arletty Jean-Louis Barrault Pierre Brasseur Marcel Herrand Pierre Renoir |
| Music by | Maurice Thiriet |
| Cinematography |
Marc Fossard Roger Hubert |
| Edited by |
Henri Rust Madeleine Bonin |
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Release date
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Running time
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190 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Box office | 4,768,505 admissions (France) |
Les Enfants du Paradis, released as Children of Paradise in North America, is a 1945 French film directed by Marcel Carné. It was made during the German occupation of France during World War II. Set among the Parisian theatre scene of the 1820s and 1830s, it tells the story of a beautiful courtesan, Garance, and the four men who love her in their own ways: a mime artist, an actor, a criminal and an .
A three-hour film in two parts, it was described in the original American trailer as the French answer to Gone With the Wind (1939), an opinion shared by the critic David Shipman. The leading nouvelle vague director François Truffaut once said: "I would give up all my films to have directed Children of Paradise". The film was voted "Best Film Ever" in a poll of 600 French critics and professionals in 1995.
As noted by one critic, "in French, 'paradis' is the colloquial name for the gallery or second balcony in a theater, where common people sat and viewed a play, responding to it honestly and boisterously. The actors played to these gallery gods, hoping to win their favour, the actor himself thus being elevated to an Olympian status." The film contains many shots of the audience hanging over the edge of these balconies (which are similarly known as "the gods" in the British theatre), and screenwriter Jacques Prévert stated that the title "refers to the actors [...] and the audiences too, the good-natured, working-class audience." In British English, Les Enfants du Paradis translates better in context as The Children of the Gods than as The Children of Paradise.
Children of Paradise is set in the theatrical world of Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–48), centred on the area around the Funambules theatre, situated on the Boulevard du Temple – pejoratively referred to as the "Boulevard du Crime". The film revolves around a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance (Arletty). Four men – the mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the thief Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou) – are in love with Garance, and their intrigues drive the story forward. Garance is briefly intrigued/involved with them all, but leaves them when they attempt to force her to love on their terms, rather than her own. The mime Baptiste is the one who suffers the most in pursuit of the unattainable Garance.
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