Rent Daybreak (1939)

Night Falls, the Past Returns, and Morning Brings No Mercy - Daybreak review by griggs

Daybreak is a slow, smoky descent into regret. I struggled with it at first, but once I understood the structure and its aim, it started to click. Gabin still has that magnetic presence, but he’s more broken and bottled up here. He’s trapped in a room, emotionally and literally cornered, replaying how it all went wrong. It’s slower, more confined than Port of Shadows or Pépé le Moko, and less instantly gripping, but there’s a bleak beauty. The apartment feels like a tomb, the flashbacks like an ambush. The past creeps in like smoke through the cracks, and when morning finally comes, it’s not hope that arrives. It’s the inevitable.

Poetic Realism. - Daybreak review by Steve

The key theme of French Poetic Realism in the years leading up to WWII, is entrapment. And the impossibility of escape. The most evocative image of this is Jean Gabin barricaded alone in the shadows of his attic room surrounded by cops. While he delays his inevitable death, he reflects on what put him there.

With its long flashbacks and fatalism and gloomy expressionism, this is the pre-war French picture which most feels like film noir. And Gabin as the ill-fated everyman is a potent noir antihero: whether alone and brooding in the dark of his tenement; or the bruised romantic who dallies with Arletty's world weary moll.

The two stars as the seen-it-all romantic dupes are immensely affecting. Marcel Carné's forlorn imagery and Jacques Prévert pessimistic script deepen this mood of loss and disappointment. Like most pre-war Poetic Realism it was censored and then banned by the French government for being bad for morale.

The solitary man trapped in a hail of gunfire is also a potent image of the coming occupation. There is evocative set design; Gabin's isolation is illustrated by his remote rooftop home. And Maurice Jaubert's downbeat score. All these make for an emotional overload. But most of all, it's the absolute exposure of Gabin's bitter, abrasive performance.