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He loves Paris
Looking back at Pépé le Moko
BY STEVE VINEBERG

Pépé le Moko
Directed by Julien Duvivier. Screenplay by Duvivier, Jacques Constant, Henri Jeanson, and Henri La Barthe. Based on the novel by La Barthe. With Jean Gabin, Mireille Balin, Gabriel Gabrio, Lucas Gridoux, Gilbert Gil, Line Noro, Saturnin Fabre, Fernand Charpin, Marcel Dalio, Gaston Modot, Fréhel, and Olga Lord. In French with English subtitles. (1937/b&w/90 minutes) At the Brattle this weekend, August 9 through 11.

Julien Duvivier made the glorious romantic melodrama Pˇpˇ le Moko in the midst of a great age in French film, the heyday of Jean Renoir, Marcel Carnˇ, Renˇ Clair, Jean Vigo. Duvivier is seldom remembered in the company of these masters, but a number of his pictures deserve a second look (like the 1932 Carrot Top). He reached his peak in 1937, when he turned out The Golem, Un carnet de bal, and Pˇpˇ le Moko. In Un carnet de bal, a woman tracks down the men on the dance card of her first ball, a precious souvenir of her youth in a provincial French town; at the climax, one of them escorts her once more to the local ball, which has survived the years, and she discovers to her dismay how her memory has glorified this tawdry setting. Pˇpˇ le Moko, which the Brattle is showing this weekend in a restored print, is also about memory and romance, but Duvivier omits the realistic disenchantment. You’re wafted out of the theater on a mist of exquisite pathos.

Jean Gabin brings his proletarian lyricism — and one of the great tragic faces of the era, with its heavy-lidded, sparkling eyes and resigned smile — to the role of Pˇpˇ, a jewel thief hiding out in the Casbah, the most exotic and mysterious quarter of Algiers. (Gabin’s career had taken off the previous year, when he played the doomed hero of Carnˇ’s Daybreak. This was also the year he starred in Renoir’s La grande illusion — and his co-star in that picture, Marcel Dalio, shows up here in the small, colorful role of the police informant L’Arbi.) Only in the Casbah, an isolated, labyrinthine area that he rules like a benign prince, is Pˇpˇ free from the long arm of the French justice system. He’s courtly even to Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), whom he meets daily; the men respect each other, and Pˇpˇ treats the policeman’s efforts to draw him out of his sanctuary with ironic wit, as if they were the latest maneuvers in a protracted chess match. But the thief feels he’s suffocating here, despite the tender (and increasingly desperate) ministrations of his mistress, In¸s (Line Noro). He aches to return to Paris, where he was happy. And then suddenly a breath of Paris enters the dank, sea-choked Casbah, in the person of Gaby (Mireille Balin), a tourist who is merely slumming until she meets Pˇpˇ.

The movie conveys its romantic tale in a series of candied visual flourishes. In her lamˇ chemise, diamonds on her arms and neck and dangling from her ears, her eyebrows penciled and arched, her hair backlit so that it builds into a blond halo, Balin is a walking objet d’art. The dense, honeycombed quarter is a production designer’s dream (Jacques Krauss created it), and it’s shot by Marc Fossard and Jules Kruger from a series of angles to emphasize its oddness and closeness. There’s a vivid sequence where Pˇpˇ and his cohort take revenge on the fat worm (Fernand Charpin) who’s betrayed one of the gang, the impulsive young Pierrot (Gilbert Gil), to the cops.

Movie lovers will find much to cherish in Duvivier’s film — like the scene where the one-time cafˇ sensation Tania (Frˇhel) sings along with a record of her signature ballad, weeping at this reminder of her vanished glory days; the scene where Gaby flings her jewels on the bed as she walks out on the rich man who’s been keeping her — and then, reconsidering the impracticality of her gesture, takes them back on her way to the door; and especially the exchange when Pˇpˇ and Gaby recite together the names of the Paris Mˇtro stations. Duvivier directs this last moment like a duet that defines both Pˇpˇ’s longing for Paris and his identification of Gaby with a magical world beyond the Casbah. When she sails back to France at the end of the picture, Duvivier frames the image of the ship through a gate that looks like the bars of a prison cell. The film isn’t profound — it’s a classic entertainment, along the lines of Casablanca — but there’s a visual and emotional completeness to it. Duvivier might have called it Exile from Happiness.

Issue Date: August 8 - 15, 2002
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