Based on a 1937 news event, and released just before the Normandy invasion, Le Ciel Est à Vous recalled for wartime France the potential for the average person to a) have aspirations, and b) realize them. And, in so doing, to achieve a kind of simple dignity, the reverberations of which were felt as highly political. It tells of a provincial couple (Charles Vanel and Madeleine Renaud) who are devoted to a joint goal: for the wife to break the world solo flying record for women. The regular existence of petit bourgeois individuals who take pride in their work is beautifully and realistically evoked in what is considered by many to be Grémillon's masterpiece. After its release, however, although clandestine press and audiences alike saw its hidden meaning and import, it became lost in the trauma that the film industry was undergoing along with the rest of the country in the spring of 1944. Critic Georges Sadoul marked this film as “having much of the feeling of neorealism--but its lack of success prevented it from becoming the seminal film of a French neorealist movement.” Sadoul wrote in 1944: “Yes, we live in a country that is rife with the deplorable taste of Henry II dressers, but also one in which the favorite myth of schoolchildren has been that of Bernard Palissy burning his Henry II dresser, his floors, and his house for an ideal.... Grémillon's heroes are real; here is the image of French heroism, this child born with no other defense than a piece of leather and a pebble.”
Based on a 1937 news event, and released just before the Normandy invasion, Le Ciel Est à Vous recalled for wartime France the potential for the average person to a) have aspirations, and b) realize them. And, in so doing, to achieve a kind of simple dignity, the reverberations of which were felt as highly political. It tells of a provincial couple (Charles Vanel and Madeleine Renaud) who are devoted to a joint goal: for the wife to break the world solo flying record for women. The regular existence of petit bourgeois individuals who take pride in their work is beautifully and realistically evoked in what is considered by many to be Grémillon's masterpiece. After its release, however, although clandestine press and audiences alike saw its hidden meaning and import, it became lost in the trauma that the film industry was undergoing along with the rest of the country in the spring of 1944. Critic Georges Sadoul marked this film as “having much of the feeling of neorealism--but its lack of success prevented it from becoming the seminal film of a French neorealist movement.” Sadoul wrote in 1944: “Yes, we live in a country that is rife with the deplorable taste of Henry II dressers, but also one in which the favorite myth of schoolchildren has been that of Bernard Palissy burning his Henry II dresser, his floors, and his house for an ideal.... Grémillon's heroes are real; here is the image of French heroism, this child born with no other defense than a piece of leather and a pebble.”

Please note: Program repeated June 29.