Terrain vague

This movie is the French response to Nick Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, the ultimate, at this time, French film about junevile delinquency, stonger than LES LOUPS DANS LE BERGERIE. But after this one, especially after May 1968, there will be tons of them. Tons...This Marcel Carné's film is not so far from the message of the features this director offered us twenty five years earlier, starring Jean Gabin. The form and settings are quite different, so the dialogues, but the social element is still very present. I like this film, despite the fact that I discover it only now. It was not that shown before, most programs prefer showing QUAI DES BRUMES or LES VISITEURS DU SOIR....

Marcel Carné is a legendary film maker : we owe him some of the greatest movies of all times... "quai des brumes", "hotel du nord", "le jour se lêve", "les visiteurs du soir", "les enfants du paradis". It is well known that his movies done after world war II don't have the magic touch of the previous ones. If it is true, it shouldn't make us forget the later movies of Marcel Carné. "Terrain vague" has been done in 1960. The times were the ones of the birth of a strange animal called "the teenager" : post-war youth didn't want to stay "adults without rights", they wanted fun, and most of all, they didn't want to be like their parents. In France, Netherlands, Japan or the USA (and many countries), it happened eight years later : the youth conquered some power and didn't live like their parents did. In the movie, a gang of Paris suburbs is bored on Sunday and tries to make money by robbing. The life of great buildings is well described, there is a few very good characters (the others are not bad but not very well developed), the main actress (a former miss France) looks like France Gall (very famous singer some years later). The soundtrack is not "rock'n'roll", it's a quite classical symphonic music and this is interesting, the movie therefore is not the typical lost teenagers story. The image is a wonderful black and white (from Claude Renoir, nephew of Jean Renoir), there is a lot of great scenes. Dialogues are not as good as what Carné used to do with Jacques Prévert, but it is astonishingly modern sometimes. So : not Carné's best, but not a shame at all, a lot could be happy for their all life if they could make that kind of movie...

Based on American novel called "Tomboy" ,which makes sense cause the leader of the pack is a girl who,like the precedent user pointed out ,resembled French pop singer France Gall.Daniele Gaubert would continue her career through the sixties,her most celebrated part was " lonesome the she wolf" a failed attempt at making a female "Diabolik".Then she married ski champion Jean-Claude Killy and died from of cancer at an early age.

It was the second time Carné had tackled the "youth" subject.In his precedent -and IMHO much better- "les tricheurs" ,he told the story of a girl ,Mic,who tried to be part of a circle of rich kids ,the golden youth of Saint Germain des Prés."Terrain vague" is a different matter ,cause it takes place in poor milieus.Ouside Big Chief (Roland Lesaffre, Carné's favorite actor and his spokesman in the movie),the youngsters are beyond the adults' command ,and Carné is not afraid to say it's high time they faced up to their responsibilities.The stairs the tired lady is climbing step by step is a good metaphor of a lost generation of parents when their baby boomers grow angry and tired of the empty life they are about to live.No future .If nobody cares about us,why should we care about them?

That said ,the first part is a bit list less,but things go much better in the second one,recalling sometimes "Rebel without a cause" ,a feeling that the threesome Dan /Lucky /Babar reinforces : it will remind you of Natalie Wood/James Dean/Sal Mineo in Ray's classic.

This was arguably Carné's last good film (not great).All the films to come would be disappointments.

We must not forget,never forget ,that Marcel Carné was one of the greatest directors of all time in his heyday (1936:"Jenny "to 1946:"les Portes de la Nuit";between those two years, all Carné made was classic)