Love in a box

Gifts and enchantment in Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des Brumes

Marcel Carné’s masterpiece of ‘poetic realism’ Le Quai des Brumes (1937), scripted by Jacques Prévert, is the story of an army deserter, Jean (Jean Gabin), who arrives in the foggy port of Le Havre in the hope of escaping across the ocean, only to find himself trapped in a tangle of love, crime, jealousy and mischance, resulting not in escape but death.
 
A series of gifts punctuate the action of the film, each one an act of generosity but each one inadvertently bringing Jean closer to his fate. Ironically, the villain of the piece, the shifty and lecherous Zabel (Michel Simon), connoisseur of classical music – ”religious music in particular” – is the proprietor of an actual gift shop.
 
Elements of the film recall the tropes of the folktale or fairy-story, particularly the scenes played out in the three major sites of action meticulously created for the film by the great art director Alexandre Trauner – Panama’s bar, Zabel’s  shop, and the Fairground.  Indeed Zabel explicitly likens himself to Bluebeard and, although he is referring to his appearance and not his personality, we eventually discover that he really is a killer who, like Bluebeard, has dismembered the body of his victim.  The ubiquity of encompassing fog, which Jean identifies as both an external element and a state of mind, is also reminiscent of a curse upon the town and its inhabitants which might have been placed by some malign entity in a folktale.
 
We first meet the fugitive, Jean, still in his army uniform, when he is given a lift into Le Havre by a truck driver (Marcel Peres).  This down-to-earth proletarian, making conversation with the tired and hungry soldier, asks him if he is on leave.  Instead of replying with a lie or an evasion, Jean remains silent.  He accepts a cigarette, the first gift of the film, from the driver and soon falls asleep.  Arriving at the outskirts of the port, the two men almost fight after Jean seizes the steering wheel to avoid the truck hitting a stray dog. But they part amicably, the truck driver giving Jean his packet of cigarettes.  While not explicitly stated, it is clear that the truck driver understands it to be likely that Jean has deserted the army and the gift of the cigarettes implies class solidarity and a promise of silence.

Setting the bar:  Alexandre Trauner's exterior set for Panama's hostelry 

​In the backstreets of Le Havre, Jean meets Quart Vittel (Raymond Aimos), a drunken vagrant who he initially finds irritating but warms to after Quart Vittel obligingly helps to shelter him in a doorway from a passing police patrol.  The vagrant then guides Jean to Panama’s, an isolated bar on a spit of land beyond the harbour.  As much as a building, Panama’s resembles the superstructure of a ramshackle craft beached by an ocean wave, and waiting to be one day carried away by another. In every way an edge place, it is apparently a refuge for lost souls rather than a commercial concern, or indeed a real place in the way the truck was real.  Presided over by Panama (Edouard  Delmont), a phlegmatic guitar-strumming former seaman in a crumpled white suit and a Panama hat which he claims to have bought in Panama in 1906, the establishment boasts a barometer whose needle has been nailed to always show fair weather and a dusty model ship corked immobile in a bottle. Talk of fog, says Panama, in his fog-bound domain, is not allowed.
 
Jean’s immediate need for food and shelter are provided for by Panama, shrugging off the soldier’s total lack of money. But the place, and the night, has more significant gifts to give.  When the melancholic, suicidally inclined, artist Michel (Robert Le Vigan) arrives, Jean is irritated by his pretentious banter but largely remains tactfully civil.  Michel will indeed decide to escape both his art and Le Havre by deliberately swimming naked to his death the following morning.  In surrendering the life he no longer feels a need to prolong, he will deliberately gift Jean not only a set of much needed civilian clothes and a large sum of money but also his passport and identity, a complete escape kit which will nevertheless be thwarted by the unintended consequences of other gifts
 
Shown into a rear room beyond the bar to eat his first food for days, Jean encounters seventeen-year-old Nelly (Michèle Morgan) who he initially takes to be a prostitute, to her mild amusement rather than dismay.  Referencing Red Riding Hood, Jean says he doubts she has come to Panama’s just to bring her granny a cake.
 
The justifiably famous first shot of Nelly at the window of Panama’s in her black beret and transparent, glistening, Chanel raincoat transforms the eccentric whimsy of Panama’s bar into lyrical enchantment.  Frequently described as ethereal, the vision of Nelly presented to Jean, and to us, in this scene offers “transcendence from the physical world, and all the misery it can bring” (Driskell, 2012).

Night watch.  Michèle Morgan

​If Jean, guided to Panama’s by a chance meeting with the simple but instinctively subversive Quart Vittal, courier of fate, had on arrival been granted three magic wishes he would likely have asked for food, a beautiful young woman, and a new identity, and that is exactly what the misshapen hut on the promontory does indeed conjure up.
 
During his evening at Panama’s and the beginning of his infatuation with Nelly, Jean moves from trying aggressively to drive away the little dog he earlier saved from the truck, which has followed him, to acknowledging it as his own and feeding it morsels of his precious meal.  The dog, in folktale fashion, has arrived in Jean’s life from nowhere and stays with him, issuing occasional warnings, throughout his efforts to escape Le Havre – but it will eventually leave him and return to its own domain when Jean’s quest fails.  In The Morphology of the Folk Tale the structuralist Vladimir Propp identifies agents such as “grateful animals” which begin as donors by begging for either help or mercy and “later place themselves at the disposal of the hero as his helpers”.
 
Lucien (Pierre Brasseur), a psychotic petty criminal with aspirations to be a gangster, and his two accomplices arrive outside Panama’s by car in pursuit of Zabel, who they believe (correctly) to be hiding nearby.  They approach the door and demand to be let in, which Panama, revolver to hand, refuses.  A short firefight ensues, but the criminals speedily drive away defeated, despite outnumbering Panama three to one (a ratio repeated in their subsequent humiliating encounters with Jean).
 
As if hedged about by an exquisite force field emanating from its proprietor’s sanguine decency, the quaint and flimsy wooden building itself as much as Panama’s old revolver seems to repel Lucien and his gang – “the house’s powers of protection against the forces that besiege it” (Bachelard, 1964).  
 
Ominously, though, evil does penetrate the bar in the form of a random bullet that portentously smashes the bottle containing the model ship, much to Quart Vittal’s astonished dismay.  Discussing miniature artefacts contained in vitrines, Susan Stewart (1993) writes “The glass eliminates the possibility of contagion, indeed of lived experience, at the same time that it maximises the possibilities of transcendent vision.”  We do later glimpse Panama beginning to repair the model ship but, the glass shattered, it is too late to exclude the contagion from his land-bound craft and those it shelters.

Ship wreck: Quart Vittal witnesses a miniature disaster.  Raymond Aimos  

​Zabel, the lecherous and jealous guardian of Nelly, is indeed hiding outside, unaware of her presence inside. His hands are literally bloodstained but not, as he at first insists, because of a cut.  We will eventually infer that he has murdered Maurice, associate of Lucien and suitor of Nelly, and that he was in the act of disposing of dismembered body parts in the sea when pursued by the gang.  A suspicious Panama, taking an instant and unconcealed dislike to Zabel, permits him to briefly enter the outer room to get a good look at him and interrogate him.  Although Jean and Nelly are safely concealed in the back room, Zabel notices the dog, which, true to its mission, barks aggressively at him  but thereby enables him when he sees it again later to guess that Nelly was at Panama’s and had encountered Jean there.
 
At dawn, Nelly, Jean, and the dog leave Panama’s and walk towards the town, the latter having undertaken to try to find Jean some civilian clothes by evening, though as yet unaware of Michel’s proposed self-sacrifice.
 
Michel delegates Panama to pass on his possessions to Jean when he returns and then calmly carries out his fatal intention to escape his own existential fog.  Carne’s shots of Robert le Vigan walking naked into the sea were vetoed by the producer (Gregor Rabinovitch), but Raymond Aimos as Panama, his baggy white suit flapping in the wind, succinctly and less sensationally conveys both the grandeur and the futility of the event.  Later, Panama will dutifully convey the artist’s morbid bequest, and then attempt to dispose of the tell-tale military uniform in the sea’s depths as phlegmatically as he served Jean his complimentary bread and cheese when he arrived the previous night.

Do you like my hat?  Edouard  Delmont  as Panama

Strolling beside the docks, Jean and Nelly encounter Lucien and his two sidekicks, one of dubious loyalty the other of dubious courage.  Jean, irritated by Lucien’s jealous harassment of Nelly, delivers a humiliating series of slaps to him and the hoodlums depart.  Nelly slips some banknotes into Jean’s uniform pocket, knowing that he has no money.  The pair arrange to meet that evening and they separate.  Nelly returns to face the music at Zabel’s for staying out all night. Jean and the faithful dog wander the streets.
 
Edward Baron Turk (1989) points to the recurrence in Quai des Brumes of miniatures and representations of modes of transport that are either static or tethered.  Although Pierre Brasseur is not unusually small, Lucien is characterised by smallness – his overcoat seems to belong to a bigger man, his gun is tiny compared to Panama’s hefty revolver.  We will later see him in a fairground bumper car, but even his real car is small, his dim and cowardly muscleman being obliged to perch in the dickie seat like a piece of luggage.
 
In a shopping street, Jean, having discovered Nelly’s gift of money in his pocket, momentarily appears to consider spending it at a second-hand clothes shop but changes his mind as the shopkeeper approaches him.

No dummy.  Jean contemplates a change of wardrobe.  Jean Gabin

Aimlessly wandering the harbour streets, he chances instead upon Zabel’s shop and sees in the window a typical seaside souvenir – a small box covered in shells.  Earlier, at the dockside, he and Nelly had contemplated the detritus in the shallow harbour water, old shoes and a comb, and Nelly had commented that this was not the real sea bed which is far further out and deeper.  Jean sees the shell-box as a way of returning some of Nelly’s gift of money, which his pride prevents him from accepting, and of expressing his love.  At the same time, he has just learned of a freighter bound for Venezuela that will sail soon, so the shells also echo the call of escape to the further out and deeper sea which had earlier seemed remote and unattainable.
 
This bijou trinket in the shop window, the likes of which can still be found in seaside gift shops today, gets its own close-up from Jean’s point of view, nestling in shiny paper or cellophane that recalls Nelly’s glossy raincoat. The close-up shot isolates the box, rightly identifying as a significant object, for it represents the turning point in Jean and Nelly’s fate, embodying a naive expression of love but also pointing the way to death, since it facilitates the meeting of Jean and Zabel and therefore triggers events that lead to both their murders – Zabel’s at Jean’s hands and Jean at Lucien’s.

Zabel’s realm, like that of the fairytale ogre he resembles, has a series of chambers: the outer shop, pretty and enticing, full of foolish delights and playthings; the inner dining room and bourgeois parlour where dubious hospitality is dispensed on fine china while choral music on the radio proclaims Zabel’s intellectual superiority over uncouth hoodlums and simple soldiers, drowning out sounds of murder and abuse from his innermost chamber, the cellar.
 
The function of the shell box gift as a plot device is brief; it is soon ignored and set aside on the shop counter once it has served to ensnare Jean in Zabel’s malign orbit.  Although Jean angrily and violently resists Zabel’s blackmailing approaches and escapes for the moment, from here on Jean is fatally torn between devotion to Nelly and escape across the ocean.

Customer service:  Jean enters Zabel's lair.   Michèle Morgan, Michel Simon, Jean Gabin

​After arranging to meet Nelly in the evening at a local fairground, Jean returns to Panama’s where he learns of and receives Michel’s bequest of civilian clothes, identity documents, and money.  Panama is typically non-committal as to why and how Michel decided to bestow the gift that has apparently solved all Jean’s problems, relieving the soldier of the knowledge that in every sense he now occupies a dead man’s shoes.
 
Returning to the docks in his new guise as Michel Kraus, artist, Jean encounters the ship’s doctor, Dr Mollet, of a Venezuela-bound cargo vessel, the Normandie, which will sail the next morning.  Mollet was once an aspiring watercolourist and relishes the company of a real artist on the voyage, so jokingly invites Jean to enrol as a passenger.
 
Taking the offer at face value, Jean, revealing to us his intention of betraying Nelly, says that there’s nothing to keep him in Le Havre, and a deal is struck with the Doctor for his passage to Venezuela. Later, in the bar of a dockside hotel, Jean reiterates his denial more specifically. The Doctor asks him straight out if he is attached to someone for whom he will return.  Jean replies: “No… No-one.”
 
An immediate cut follows these words and we hear jolly fairground music and see a close-up of Nelly leaning on what appears to be a ships rail – as the camera pulls back she is joined by Jean and we realise that they are posing before a naively painted fairground photographer’s backcloth of an ocean liner, also called Normandie.
 
If Panama’s bar is a somewhat ineptly enchanted hut where wishes can be granted and Zabel’s shop is a pretty gingerbread house hung with poisonous cookies, the fairground is a charmed if gaudy thicket where time stands still so that love can blossom and an absurd goblin (Lucien) can be sent packing, shrieks of derision from his entourage ringing in his ears.
 
Nelly buys a pretty lead for the hitherto unencumbered dog, consolidating the three of them as a family unit even as Jean has just slipped away briefly to obtain his passport photo. The lovers find a dark spot between two sideshows and in the ensuing romantic exchange the tension in Jean between the growing certainty of his love for Nelly and his equally certain intention to take the ship is masterfully channelled by Carné, Gabin, Morgan, and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan.  In extreme close-up Gabin delivers the simple, famous, line that that was to identify Michèlle Morgan’s star persona for years: “T’as de beaux yeux, tu sais” (You’ve got beautiful eyes, you know). The two embrace and kiss passionately.
 
Later, on the fair’s bumper-car ride, Lucien aggressively swipes off Jean’s hat, which of course is Michel’s hat, both provoking Jean and exposing his disguise.  In response Lucien receives vigorous slaps from Jean for the second time, to the bemusement of his two sidekicks, their loyalty to their boss now visibly evaporating.  Further humiliated by the hysterical laughter of his raucous girlfriend (Jenny Burnay) Lucien retreats, vowing to kill both Jean and Zabel.

He who's been slapped - Lucien mocked.  Pierre Brasseur, Jenny Burnay, ​Claude Walter.

​Later Jean and Nelly sit at a café table beside a gently turning children’s roundabout ride in the now nearly deserted fairground. They muse on their situation and on the mystery that is the occasional kindness of strangers, who bestow gifts on those who need them and then disappear from their lives.  Jean speaks some reassuring words to Nelly about their future, but his expression betrays ambiguity about his intentions.  As they depart the deserted fairground, a high (omniscient) shot concluding in a fade shows a man on a ladder hanging dark tarpaulins around the now static roundabout, shutting away the magic.
 
Likening the enduring appeal of Quai des Brumes in France to that of Casablanca in Anglophone countries, Turk (1989) concludes “Its nostalgic power derives in large measure from its depiction of love… Carné succeeds, too, in rendering palpable a scenario of two beings who assert their love despite the odds”.
 
Part of this appeal resides in the public knowledge that Gabin and Morgan themselves became lovers. Although this was not until a couple of years after the Quai shoot, it is anecdotally clear that whilst Gabin was professionally guiding the inexperienced teenage actress he was also flirting.  In her autobiography Morgan (1978) recalls that when shooting a (subsequently cut) scene between the two, Carné instructed her to direct her eyeline to cameraman Schüfftan’s ear. By the time the cue arrived, Gabin had placed his own “beautiful blue” eyes between Morgan’s eyes and Schüfftan’s ear.

We'll always have Le Havre:  Jean and Nelly.  Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin

​Jean and Nelly spend the night together as lovers at the quayside hotel close to the berth of the Normandie.  In the morning they discover from the newspaper and the hotel waiter that the sea has relinquished both the dismembered corpse of Maurice, Zabel’s victim, and Jean’s military uniform, inevitably causing the authorities and public gossip to link the two and classify “the soldier” as a murderer. 
 
Jean confesses to Nelly that he has deceived her and will soon leave her to board the ship.  She responds tenderly that it would have made no difference if she had known that the night before.  He explains that he is a wanted man and must leave on the ship, but will in time return for her.  They part, Nelly to Zabel’s, to try to silence him with her accusations of Maurice’s murder, and Jean to the ship, where in the Doctor’s room he ties the dog to a post by its new lead and paces anxiously.
 
In Zabel’s cellar Nelly confronts her guardian with her certainty that he killed Maurice.  Zabel eventually self-pityingly confesses that he murdered Maurice out of uncontrollable jealousy and he starts to threaten and molest Nelly but is interrupted by Jean, who has left the ship to return to her. They attempt to leave the cellar but are attacked by Zabel with a box-cutting knife. Enraged and disgusted, Jean overpowers and kills Zabel, smashing his head several times with a brick.
 
As a response to Zabel’s attempt to violate Nelly and kill Jean, as Turk (1989) points out, “despite its luridness, the atrocity takes on the character of a spiritual act. With sacred choir music blaring from the radio upstairs, Jean assumes the role of a Saint George slaying the dragon in his lair.”
 
After killing Zabel, though, Jean appears dazed and indifferent to the urgency of escape.  For him, the fog of war, the fog in his head that he described to the truck driver at the beginning of the film, has engulfed him. Taking charge, Nelly is no longer the sweet girl at the fairground, she is a lover who must think for both of them. She urges Jean to get back to the ship and steers him to the door, but outside the shop with its window of dainty seaside trinkets he is gunned down by Lucien, who then drives away in his car.
 
As Jean dies on the cobbles, Nelly gives him the last gift, and the only one still possible, she kisses him for the final time.
 
Lucien has sped away from his deed of revenge in his car but, as in his fairground bumper car, he has nowhere to go.  Bluebeard has laid an irreversible curse on him – we learned earlier in the film that Zabel has arranged that in the event of his own sudden death certain documents incriminating Lucien in serious crimes will be released to the right people.
 
Quart Vittal, who earns a bare subsistence by tapping wine barrels at the docks and selling-on the haul, has for once resisted blowing all his day’s takings on drink and taken a room at the hotel where Jean and Nelly spent the night.  Playing fairy godmother to himself (for who else is there to grant his desires) Quart Vittal fulfils his own wish to sleep between clean white sheets just once in his life.  Wakened by the deafening blast of the departing freighter’s whistle, he retreats beneath the covers to shut out the reality that has shattered his modest and only dream.
 
In Doctor Mollet’s room on board the Normandie the dog breaks free from the pretty lead, literally snapping the last tie to the enchantment of the fairground and to the power of love over adversity, and just making it onto the dockside as the gangplank is hauled away.
 
“T’as de beaux yeux, tu sais”.
 
He runs fast, the little dog, trotting back along the Route Nationale on which we first met him – heading to anywhere but Le Havre.

References:
Bachelard, Gaston. 1958. The Poetics of Space (English trans, Jolas, Maria. 1964)
Driskell, Jonathan. 2012. Marcel Carné.
Morgan, Michelle, 1978. With those Eyes, an Autobiography.
Propp, V, 1928, The Morphology of the Folktale (English trans. Laurence Scott, 1958)

©Ballooon mein Herr,  2018