“You can find the sea everywhere. But there’s only one Faubourg.”
To hear the review
Faubourg 36 comes out on DVD May 12th from Alliance Films. It’s a foreign film, with involvement from the Czech Republic, Germany and France. It’s in French, but comes with English subtitles. And it’s good. It’s about a small opera house in Paris in 1936, struggling to make ends meet while the Third Reich rises in Germany and the labour movement gives workers power they have never had before. The central character in the film, Douce (Nora Arnezeder) is a gorgeous young woman with a remarkable voice who becomes a singing superstar at the Faubourg. She is beholden to a local gangster who has hopes for making her his bride, and when she falls in love with a young man at the theatre company, it could spell disaster for everybody.
Really, there are many central characters in the movie, not just Douce, and they are all charming and wonderful. Germain Pigoli (Gerard Jugnot), the man who runs the vaudeville house, has just lost his wife, who ran off with her lover and took his son. He is the most interesting person in the movie, as he tries to reconnect with his son and fights to save the theatre while trying not to lose heart. The funniest actor in the movie is Kad Merad, who plays Jacky Jaquet. He’s an old-school vaudevillian whose talent is…well…limited. But his love for performing can’t keep him down, and despite the fact that he is, for the most part, dreadful, he keeps going with more enthusiasm than anyone else.
The nice thing about Faubourg 36 is that although it’s set in 1936, and there is a huge amount of stuff going on outside the theatre (aryan rallies, and labour disputes, and so forth), the movie remains very much character driven and engaging. The outside factors play into the story only a small amount, and they serve only to place the movie in the context of the times in which it is set. The actors drive the story, they’re all wonderful, and the story is charming. It’s funny, it’s dramatic, and it’s totally worthwhile.
