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Rue des Prairies
1959 Drama
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Credits
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Director: Denys de La Patellière
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Script: Michel Audiard, Denys de La Patellière, René Lefèvre (novel)
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Photo: Louis Page
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Music: Georges Van Parys
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Cast: Jean Gabin (Henri Neveux),
Marie-José Nat (Odette Neveux),
Claude Brasseur (Louis Neveux),
Roger Dumas (Fernand Neveux),
Renée Faure (Me Surville),
Louis Seigner (Le procureur),
Jacques Monod (Le président),
Dominique Page (Josette),
François Chaumette (Le directeur de l'école),
Guy Decomble (Le père de Paul)
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Country: Italy / France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 87 min; B&W
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Aka: Rue de Paris
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Summary
Released from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1942, Henri Neveu returns to his modest Parisian
apartment to learn that his wife has just died giving birth. Knowing he is not the
father of the new-born, Fernand, Henri brings him up as his own, along with his two children
Louis and Odette. Seventeen years later, Henri’s happy household is about to break
up. Louis is now a professional cyclist and Odette wants to start a career as a
cover girl and marry an older man. The youngest, Fernand, is the biggest worry.
Rebellious and undisciplined, he manages to get himself expelled from school. Try
as he might, Henri finds it increasingly difficult to understand his grown-up children...
Review
Rue des Prairies was based on a novel by the
well-known French actor, René Lefèvre, and gave Claude Brasseur his first
significant film role. It was released just a few months after François Truffaut’s
Les
400 coups. Both films deal with similar themes - the conflict between
the generations and the rebelliousness of an unloved adolescent. Yet, in terms of
cinematic approach and impact, the two films could hardly be more different.
Rue des Prairies is very much in the mould
of a conventional French film for its time, with a big name lead actor (and they didn’t
come much bigger than Jean Gabin) and an ensemble of highly stereotypical characters (in
this case, a grotesquely bourgeois view of the working class). Truffaut's film is
something completely fresh and groundbreaking, with believable characters and realistic
situations, written, directed and acted with a sense of spontaneity and genuine engagement
with its subject. It’s not hard to see which is the better film and why the other
has been all but forgotten. (A propos, the actor who played the harsh schoolmaster
in Les 400 coups, Guy Decomble, has a small
role in Rue des Prairies...)
Rue
des Prairies is a film that cries out for a serious social realist approach, but
what it gets is the bog-standard, take-no-chances, overly sanitised pro forma which defined
mainstream cinema in France in the 1950s (regarded by many French film enthusiasts as
the "grey decade".). For its time, it’s not a particularly bad film - the script
is bland but not awful, there's an engaging performance from Jean Gabin, and it does get
across some important social messages (for example, the extent to which parents are to
be held responsible for their children's actions). The trouble is that the approach
is just too pedestrian, too uninspired for the film to make any impact - particularly
when you put it next to the kind of film the directors of the Nouvelle Vague were starting
to make.
© James Travers 2007
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