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...
Review of Terrain vague
