“The perfection of Le Jour se Lève,” wrote Andre Bazin, “is that its symbolism never outweighs its realism but rather is complementary to it.”
From an apartment house in a populated working class suburb, a shot is heard. A man stumbles out, falls dead. His killer, locked in his attic flat, shoots again, and the police lay siege until daybreak. Francois (Jean Gabin) has until dawn to reconstruct for himself the events which led to this end. Alternating between the past narrative (in which Arletty plays a music hall performer who moves in with Francois) and the present moves of the police siege, Le Jour se Lève tells its tale of “despair, inevitability of fate, and a working-class character unable to find his place in the world” (Jean Queval, BFI). Written by Jacques Prevert, Le Jour se Lève is one of the great works of the French cinema, “A tragedy of purity and loneliness...allowing the inherent poetry to free itself and...drawing out the heart of the drama. It is in this sense that one can speak of ‘poetic realism'” (Andre Bazin). (JB)