Children of Paradise is an epic tale of 19th Century Parisian life, at once a tragic romance and a study of performance on stage and in life. But despite its epic scope and grand metaphors, it is presented with a light touch, with humour and charm. In this sense, it is traditional storytelling at its best, resembling a Victorian novel that evokes a social milieu within a finely constructed narrative and makes sweeping statements about life only via that narrative. As such, although the cinematography and performances are a delight in themselves, the film’s narrative is its principal focus and its greatest asset.
That narrative is divided in two parts, and its most notable feature is the mirroring of those two parts. The film opens with a scene of Paris streets crowded with carnival-goers, a great mass of bustling life. In a sequence of short segments, beginning with a wonderfully immersive tracking shot, we are introduced to all the central characters as elements of this mass. But as the film progresses, those characters are singled out and the mass moves to the background. What at first seems to present itself as a broad story of the life of 19th century Paris instead turns into a very personal drama about a small cast of characters; as one character says, “Paris is very small for those who love each other with such a grand passion.” (In keeping with the tone of the film, this weighty remark is stated almost facetiously and is in no way emphasized—only upon reflection does it resonate with the narrative’s structure.) The film’s second part reverses this movement. Again the crowds appear, greeting the return of the carnival, but now the central characters are cloistered away in hotel rooms and bathhouses rather than being part of the general mass. Over the course of the final scene, two of the characters are drawn out into the crowd, and despite the best attempts of one of them to catch the other, the crowd overwhelms him, at one point literally swirling around him, and the last we see of him is his disappearance amidst a sea of faces. Thus, the personal drama that arose from the mass of life is again subsumed by it.
One interesting aspect of this mirror structure is the way it influences our relation to the central characters. Most of these characters are stage performers, and at first we see their performances from their audience’s perspective, as objects for our entertainment (and they are most certainly entertaining—pantomime never looked so good!). The movement from the objectivity of the group to the subjectivity of the individual is then evinced by a shift in the depiction of the central characters’ stage performances: by the conclusion of the film’s first part, we see the performances purely in terms of what they mean to the characters themselves. In the reverse movement of the second half, the performances gradually disappear from the narrative, as the characters are dissolved into the mass: by the film’s conclusion, the characters have returned to the mass, but no longer as performers; their position as elements of the mass is now viewed from their perspective rather than from that of the mass as audience.
Of course, the film’s focus is not on the initial rise from the mass or the final return, but rather on the aforementioned central movement: that in which we see the performances in terms of what they mean to the characters themselves. One of the two principal male characters, Baptiste, is obsessed with perfect, consuming love, with his fate—generally, with “the real”. He treats life as something deadly serious, and though he adopts a very mannered, exaggerated performance in life, he treats this role as a fixed idea. This attitude is reflected in his performance on the stage: the first part of the film ends with his production of a pantomime in which he places all his despair, and in which his performance literalizes his desperate love for an idealized, unattainable woman. It is as if he cannot, or will not, escape his notion of his own life. The second of the two principals, Lemaitre, is always aware of the world as a stage, always treating life as a play (in both senses of the word). Like Baptiste, he is ceaselessly performing in life, but he is self-aware in his performance—he knows that he is putting on a show. And, again, this is reflected on the stage: the second part opens (again, we see the film’s mirror structure) with a hilariously anarchic scene in which Lemaitre performs in a play that he doesn’t care for, and which he proceeds to reinvent and mock as he performs it. Just as in life, he treats the play as pure play, as something somewhat unreal and certainly unfixed. However, he still thinks of both life and stage in terms of roles that he can adopt. Another character is a writer. Unlike the performers, he does not treat life as a stage on which he acts: he treats it as a story which he must control—and which, in the end, he does, essentially rewriting the story that the other characters think themselves to be in, and remaining constantly apart from the pull of the social mass.
These broad character types, in their emergence from the social milieu surrounding them, and in their relationships with the personal melodrama that they emerge into, serve not only as well defined characters to root for or to loathe, depending on one’s personal inclination, but as distinct representations of modes of confronting life: as something to be lived in terms of fixed ideals and a striving for the Ideal; as a self-conscious dismissal and manipulation of abstract ideals in favour of pure living; or as a deliberate overthrow of those ideals, an attempt to force life’s narrative to conform to one’s own will.
