Panic

The first post-war film made in France by Julien Duvivier, Panique (Panic) proved to be a complicated comeback for the director, failing both critically and with audiences. Yet all the elements of poetic realism that made Duvivier such a success before the war were present in the film, with its cheeky-chappy working-class setting, a certain fairytale dimension in the use of the realistic, yet fake, decor of the nearby funfair, and the magnificent, cursed character of Monsieur Hire. Whereas, despite its dark impulses (or positivism for the period of the Front Populaire), the genre exalted noble values and a certain romanticism, Duvivier reverses the theme here with this incredibly harsh and disillusioned film about human nature, in which he freely adapts Georges Simenon’s Les Fiançailles de M. Hire. Right from the opening scene, Duvivier isolates his strange Monsieur Hire from the rest of the population, using a clever zoom as the camera sweeps over the urban landscape of this small neighbourhood. The symbolism is reinforced a few scenes later on a dodgem ride where all the participants pick on him for no reason. (Justin Kwedi; dvdclassik.com)