Remorques

Cowritten by Jacques Prévert, Remorques stars Jean Gabin as a tugboat captain working the storm-battered coast of Brittany, where, as in so many classics of romantic fatalism, atmosphere and environment become extended metaphors for a turbulent existential condition. When the moody Michèle Morgan washes into Gabin's life, he begins to become unmoored from his marriage to fragile Madeleine Renaud. Grémillon was trained as a musician, and he makes distinctive use of sound, rising to a remarkable climax that sees Gabin casting off into yet another storm while sonorous voices utter a somber prayer for deliverance. The production weathered storms of its own: begun in the summer of 1939, it wasn't completed until 1941, after the producer had fled the Nazi Occupation.

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