“We meant to die together but we failed. You can’t always win.” Opening with a cheerless young couple who perfectly embody the French concept of “ennui” (boredom with a dash of fatalism) searching for a room where they can enact their suicide pact, Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord combines crime and romance, yet one hesitates to call it either a crime film or a romantic drama. The story focuses on the intersection of two couples staying at the titular hotel: suicidal young lovers Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), and prostitute Raymonde (Arletty) and her pimp Edmond (Louis Jouvet) who’s keeping a low profile to avoid his criminal associates. After the younger couple botch their suicides, Pierre winds up in jail for attempted murder and Edmond winds up in love with Renée (the scene in which Edmond reveals his background to her on a moonlit park bench is breathtaking). In keeping with the French poetic realism aesthetic, Carné adds countless lyrical touches in lighting and compositions, in dialogue (some lines, however, go over the top, such as “We have nothing left but our love in this world”), and, especially in the film’s centerpiece, the brilliantly epic studio set designed by Alexandre Trauner: the hotel facade is surrounded by blocks of Parisian buildings, the Canal Saint Martin and its footbridges, the park and benches, cars and bicycles riding by, a lively carnival and fireworks filling the plaza for Bastille Day in the final sequence.