The uncertainty and confusion of the French people during the months between the end of Nazi occupation and the end of the war  are brilliantly illustrated in Marcel Carné’s Les portes de la nuit (US: Gates of the Night), his final work of poetic realism (more emphasis on poetic than realism), his final collaboration with writer Jacques Prévert, and the only film in this collection based on a ballet (also penned by Prévert). In a murky limbo where collaborators and informers haven’t yet been held to account, which France will emerge from the war’s ashes? Which France deserves to die under the roaring wheels of progress? The film’s characters represent competing answers to these urgent questions: shady, greedy businessman Georges (Pierre Brasseur), his spoiled but discontented wife Malou (Nathalie Nattier), her execrable brother and Nazi informer Guy (Serge Reggiani), their self-centered, German collaborating father (Saturnin Fabre), and the innocent stranger Jean Diego (a baby-faced Yves Montand in his second film role) with whom Malou falls in love and spends one beautiful evening in the gloomy ruins of Paris, unaware that their one-night affair is a prelude to murder. What tilts the film into deep surrealism, aside from the gloomy, dreamy atmosphere drifting across Paris rooftops, is a sort of messenger among these characters, a tramp named Destiny (Jean Vilar) who seems to be observing these interactions and predicting their fates, but his presence could just as easily be a delusion or hallucination. A commercial flop likely due to its unflinchingly downbeat tone, it was the most expensive French film ever made at that time, including an entire metro station constructed on a sound stage. With the film taking place over a single night, cinematographer Agostini crafts beautiful dream imagery, thick shadows, oblique framing, and deep focus, all creating a world that accommodates both romance and rage in equal measure.