Port of Shadows (1938)

Port of Shadows (dir. Michel Carné), a true classic of French poetic realism, exudes existentialist philosophy, but perhaps without that philosophy's constant elevation of a sort of gritted-teeth heroism. Well, yes, it's a somber, melancholy movie, set in foggy le Havre. The main character is a grim-looking deserter. He just wants to get away, hop onto a liner to Venezuela where nobody knows him. He ends up in le Havre, where he is taken to a place where all kinds of lowlives hang out (everyone is involved in some sort of shady business). Then there's the encounter with a girl of course. She is also running away from something. There's also a tragic suicide which equips him with a passport. So will he take the girl under his wing and will they both find a sanctuary in Venezuala? No, this is not that kind of film. The cinematography of Port of Shadows is wonderful, dreamy: there is fog everywhere, but the images also have a strange matter-of-factness to them, which you might not expect from a movie labeled 'poetic realism'. The ragged aesthetic of raincoats and quays might appear like a hopeless cliché, and indeed, this is by no means a perfect films - its defaitism is on the brink of one-dimensional pessimism (love is but an ephemeral ruse etc.), but at the same time, Port of Shadows never gets too pompous. What I didn't like about the film was its predictable doomed love affair - the innocent girl, world-weary girl of 17 and the experienced and equally world-weary man. It didn't speak to me at all. The film's own perspective remains unsettled: are we thrown into a world in which people no longer believe in love, that they have hardened their hearts, or is the point that the world can't inhabit love? In my opinion, the grimness and deep-rooted gloom of Port of Shadows works better as a beautiful film noir than as a clear-sighted philosophical tract.