“In 1939 the film was banned for being ‘immoral, depressing, and detrimental to young people.'” read the opening credits explaining the history and restoration process of “;Port of Shadows”.
This early observation threatened to ruin my watching experience, as it flavored how I reacted to it at first. Luckily, I’m not a young person, so I had nothing to worry about. But I kept waiting for the depressive moment. Nevertheless, that distraction didn’t last very long, for I soon became immersed into the shadows.
The characters are all flawed and could be criticized for being sexist, abusive, ruthless, and , yes, immoral. But they are all so human that you fall in love with them, even if you cannot understand why you would be so naive as to love them.
It’s perhaps serendipitous, that I had just watched “White Nights” (Le Notti Bianche, Luchino Visconti, 1957) the day before. Both films are about a beautiful woman incomprehensibly falling in love with an older man, and about a man infatuated by a beautiful woman and having the happiest day of their lives, even though their love was doomed from the start. They are both male fantasies in black-and-white, with beautiful music and cinematography, and fog.
“To me, a swimmer is already a drowned man.” This line spoken by an artist early in Marcel Carné’s Le quai des brumes (US: Port of Shadows) beautifully encapsulates the film’s wistful spirit. Perhaps the apotheosis of the French poetic realism movement, Carné’s film manufactures a bright romance amidst a bleak minefield of gangsters, predators, and police. Appearing far more world-weary than her mere seventeen years on earth would justify, Michèle Morgan plays Nelly, the ward and possible sex slave of her homely godfather Zabel (Michel Simon) who may have murdered her previous boyfriend, and Jean Gabin plays Jean, an army deserter and drifter preparing to escape the nothingness of his life by boarding a ship to Venezuela. Having met by chance at Panama’s, a remote dockside hole-in-the-wall where Jean obtained civilian clothes, new identity papers, and a warm meal, the couple is able to spend one beautiful night together before their demons come calling. A little stray dog becomes Jean’s permanent companion, perhaps representing the innocence the young lovers wish they still had. Carné conjures port city Le Havre as a dreamy, self-contained island of fate where fog rolls by and windows glow at night, the plaintive horns of ships constantly reminding us of all the possibilities lost.
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