The sun is rising

By the time dawn breaks, it’s already all over for François. To escape the police, the factory worker has barricaded himself in his small flat in an industrial suburb of Paris. Flashbacks recount his ill-fated love for the flower-seller Françoise, his brief affair with Clara, and his reckoning with the cunning Valentin. Marcel Carné’s *i* (*Le jour se lève* ), based on a screenplay by Jacques Prévert, is regarded as one of the most influential French films of the pre-war period and a milestone of poetic realism. The drama reflects the atmosphere of hopelessness shortly before the war and was banned as ‘demoralising’ after the war broke out. ‘No other French star is killed as often at the end of his films as Jean Gabin. Historically, this is not entirely accurate, yet one is tempted to believe that the flashback was invented for him: for the first time in French cinema, in Le jour se lève, a man doomed to die looks back on the events that drive him into isolation and to take his own life.” (Gerhard Midding, Stadtkino Basel, Jan 2012)