Review of Hôtel du Nord (1938) by Art S — 22 Feb 2017

Fatalistic and willing to look into the void, Carné's poetic realist film begins with a failed double suicide pact and moves forward from there, deciding eventually that there is but one true love that we are destined to find.

Although perhaps this destiny is not for everyone, because Louis Jouvet's mysterious ex-gangster winds up with no one (accepting an avoidable death instead). Arletty (playing a prostitute more frankly than Hollywood would allow) manages to struggle along making the best of her lot, pragmatically, losing Jouvet but settling for comic everyman Bertrand Blier instead.

These are just a few of the characters and stories that populate the Hotel Du Nord, a low rent bar/hotel that feels like a real community albeit in an art-directed Paris created on a sound-stage with two dimensional backdrops (the poetic atmosphere that envelops the kernel of realness in the events and characters).

On the eve of WWII (not even hinted at), an uncomfortable sense of the inescapable hangs ominously over the film (the sorrow and the pity were yet to come, particularly for Arletty). But at a deeper level, the yin and yang of existentialism and fatalism hold the viewer transfixed in the balance.

Carne went on to make his masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis a few years later under the auspices of the Vichy government.