Terrain vague (1960) User Reviews

Tomboy

[dbdumonteil · 6/10 · 21 September 2006]

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)

Still from Marcel Carné

[jean-no · 10/10 · 28 July 2004]

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...

"Hunger makes a wolf come out of the woods."

[morrison-dylan-fan · 10/10 · 4 August 2016]

Learning about the film maker after choosing the Film Noir Le Jour se Leve (1939-also reviewed) for a viewing fest on titles in French cinema that were affected by the Nazi Occupation of France,I decided that it was time to take a close look at Marcel Carné's work.

Dazzled by Jacques Becker's rise of the teenager in Rendezvous in July (1949-also reviewed),I decided that it was the perfect time to witness Carné's take on the juvenile delinquent.

View on the film:

Backed by a thunderous score from Michel Legrand & Francis Lemarque,co-writer(along with Henri Jeanson and Henri-François Rey) director Marcel Carné and cinematographer Claude "nephew of Jean" Renoir strike operatic teen Melodrama with Film Noir grime.

Shot on "the projects" getting built at the time, Carné enriches the Film Noir with an earthy atmosphere spanning "on the spot" outdoor locations chasing the gang with rapid-fire tracking shots across a screen that Carné soaks in grain.

Getting down to the ground with a magnificent shot covering an entire house, Carné stubs the Film Noir grit with a poetic teenage Melodrama rage. Nodding to James Dean with iconic white t-shirts, Carné makes sure to keep the Film Noir mood intact,by looking high up at the sky and pouring busted nerves and misery on everything in sight.

Transferred from Hal Ellson's US novel "Tomboy" the screenplay by Carné/Jeanson and Rey take the unique choice of making Dan the leader of the gang,whose silent confidence the writers brilliantly run counter against the more dramatic actions from the boys.

Cornering Babar with a stunning twist of the knife,the writers give the Film Noir an infectious teenage twist. Keeping the youthful rebellion bubbling under their skins,the writers give the gang raw deals stuffed with a rich Film Noir bitterness,that gives successful (and failed) robberies and a power play battle between the guys a moody brittleness.

Looking beautiful stepping out in a dress while pushing lines of clothes to the side, Danièle Gaubert gives an eye-catching performance as Dan, (talk about spending ages coming up with a name) whose delicate appearance Gaubert links with a masculine confidence.

Burning the candle at both ends, Jean-Louis Bras gives a heart wrenching performance as Film Noir teen loner Babar,whose touching feeling for Dan are wiped away by the sheer horror Bras puts in Babar's eyes,as he finds the gang to have left him in a Film Noir wasteland.

The Babar In The Room

[writers_reign · 16 June 2013]

There's a delicious irony at work here: the petulant child Truffaut and equally deadbeat chums Godard and the like were wont to shout from the rooftops that the 'old guard' as represented by Marcel Carne were 'out of touch' with the real world and along comes Carne with first Les Tricheurs and then Terrain Vague which totally eclipses Truffaut's over-hyped 400 Yawns. When dealing with Carne's 21 full-length feature films, made over 41 years we tend to divide them into the eight made in the first decade (1936-1946), seven of which had screenplays by Jacques Prevert and the eighth by Jean Aurenche and Henri Jeannson, and the thirteen made after the split with Prevert. Whilst there is no disputing the virtual run of Classics beginning with Jenny and culminating in Les Portes de la nuit (even as I write this review in June, 2013, Hotel du Nord is being screened at Cine Lumiere in London, some 74 years after it was made) his post-Prevert output also yielded several fine entries not least Therese Raquin, L'Air de Paris and Trois Chambres a Manhattan. Terrain Vague addresses what was more a less a universal social problem in the late fifties, the rise of the disaffected teenager and of the several films that did address the problem Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause remains the most charismatic due almost totally to leading player James Dean who contrived to epitomise the 'troubled' teenager without trying. Alas, Terrain Vague lacks an actor with Dean's charisma and its debt to Ray's film is crystal clear not least in Babar, it's young (at fifteen by far the youngest of the 24 gang members) who corresponds directly to Plato (Sal Mineo) in Rebel and does indeed form a triumvirate with Dan (Daniel Gaubert) and Lucky (Maurice Cafarelli). Shot in 1960 a time when the 'projects' were just emerging in the Paris suburbs, the film makes full use of the terrain vague (vacant lot) of its title both metaphorically and realistically and is certainly worth seeing for Carne fans.