"He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.”
~ Victor Hugo

Julien Duvivier returned from spending the war in America to scandalise France with his coruscating examination of collaboration and betrayal in his masterful 1946 film Panique. Possibly sensing he was persona non grata in his homeland for holding up a mirror of uncomfortable truths, he made only one film in France in the next five years, a non-controversial romantic melodrama and two others overseas with English actors, including a bloodless Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh. In 1951 he returned and effectively made a valentine to Paris, even if it had his cynical heart and critical eye as central components of the observations. Duvivier wrote the piece with his old colleague and acting stalwart René Lefèvre, a fixture in French film since René Clair’s Le Million (and the star of Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and a Resistance hero) - after having worked with Henri Jeanson and Charles Spaak on his two previous films, Duvivier’s fingerprints were all over what may be seen as his love letter to the City of Light. 

The story follows the ordinary lives of seemingly disconnected Parisians over the course of one day. Mme. Perrier (Sylvie), an old lady has no money and leaves her apartment to beg enough to buy food to feed her many cats. Mathias (Raymond Hermantier), a young and lonely sculptor, struggles with his mental demons as he grinds away frustratingly at his art. Jules (Jean Brochard) is a striking worker who will miss his wedding anniversary celebrations because the strike is not settled. Denise (Brigitte Auber) is a young, starry eyed provincial girl, not long in Paris, dreaming of romantic love in the big city and set on a modelling career. Marie-Thérèse (Christiane Lénier) is Denise’s flatmate who is going out with Georges (Daniel Ivernel), a medical student who is struggling to pass his exams despite his practical competency. Collette (Marie-France) is an 8-year-old girl who gets lost and tries to find her way home.   

If a film can be said to be both sentimental and devoid of sentiment, then Sous le Ciel de Paris comes closest. The dilemma of the old lady is heartbreaking – only the hardest heart would not react to her troubles, yet Duvivier is showing a society that largely turns its back on her in her time of need, building the tension incredibly to what seems an inevitably bleak finale. Duvivier was also calculating enough to have his models outfitted by Dior for the stunning locations, where the models are urged to, ‘Smile like you just buried your whole family.’ Duvivier sets expectation only to subvert them – Model Denise drops her childhood artist boyfriend who had come chasing her in the city after receiving her ‘Dear Jacques’ letter – ‘Been cuckolded?’ he is asked, ‘By correspondence’ is his ironic reply. 

The artist Mathias is tortured, as revealed by the voiceover Duvivier employs (written by Henri Jeanson and delivered by François Périer) to help pull the disparate strands of the narrative together, and is described as, ‘A haunted man attached to his shadow.’ Little Collette is regaled with scary stories by her young, hard-edged street urchin friend, particularly a pirate tale of putting children in barrels and eating them. They set sail on the Seine and lost Collette eventually finds a scary pirate of sorts in Mathias – Duvivier’s take on Frankenstein and the child. The scenes in the barrel yard between the 8-yr old child and the murderer are superbly handled and the editing at every point of the film is superb – notably the scenes of Georges medical exam that involve extreme anxiety and tension – Duvivier leans into the close ups of sweating and ticking clocks, on the offhand, disinterested examiners (except one), with quick cuts and a fine score from Jean Wiéner, alternately lush or disturbing.Wiéner was a frequent collaborator with Duvivier across two decades by this point and produced a great score that added to the atmosphere in concert with the brilliant cinematography by Nicholas Hayer (who had shot Clouzot’s Le Corbeau)who showed the glamourous and grimy Paris with equal artistry. 

Duvivier retained the mood of mystic fatalism that was central to the Poetic Realist movement of the 1930s, of which he was a prime mover, and the notion of fate overhangs the narrative of Sous le Ciel de Paris at every turn. Denis consults a fortune teller and the result underscores Duvivier’s cynicism – the night she is murdered she had a winning lottery ticket in her bag – this duality is suggested by Duvivier elsewhere – the river throws up a corpse but also carries the lives of two children, the hope of the future. The brute madness of the artist is contrasted by the innocence of the child. The artist mistakes affection from a prostitute (‘That’s what I like about you, a raw poetry’) as love, when he berates her after she asks for money, she says, ‘I’ll give you some brutal poetry!’ Denise comes to a wistful conclusion as she learns that, ‘love is better dreamed of than felt’,  before her dreams are tragically cut short.  

Duvivier had used vignette-as-device in several ‘portmanteau’ or anthology films, but in his wonderful Un carnet de bal the central character of the woman visiting former dance partner ties it together, and in his American films Tales of Manhattan it’s a coat jacket that links the pieces whereas Flesh and Fantasy has three separate sections with different characters. Sous le Ciel de Paris resembles a Robert Altman film like Nashville or Short Cuts, where disparate characters eventually might overlap to a greater or lesser extent, a device Michael Haneke memorably used in his superb 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance in the 1990s, where the threads tie together at the end.  

Duvivier had a theme song written for the film, one that became a classic and was sung by Jean Bretonnièrehere - ‘But the Parisian sky is not cruel for long, to be forgiven, it offers a rainbow’ (composed by Hubert Giraud, lyrics by Jean Dréjac) - the song would be covered by many artists, Yves Montand, Juliette Gréco, Édith Piaf et al. but it sums up the existentialist philosophy at the heart of the film: that Paris, with all her charms, remains immutable and indifferent  to the various human travails taking place under her skies – it’s up to us to make sense of them and our place within humanity.  

Julien Duvivier made another 17 feature films before his untimely death in a car accident, and a handful of those are worthy of his best work, but Sous le Ciel de Paris is a modest and understated masterpiece that belongs amongst his best. He reconstructed his career post war in France and had box office hits but failed the Cahiers purity test and was a victim of reputational harm by the new wavers intent of washing away the old guard of which he was declared enemy of cinema No 1. Sous le Ciel de Paris is in fact the epitome of an auteur film, one completely controlled by the artist making the statement, and Duvivier’s reminder that all kinds of lives are lived under the sky of Paris is as personal as it gets.A truly wonderful film from a fine talent. Full stop.