The trailer for Paris 36.
A story of friendship, a story of love and brotherhood - Paris 36 is all these, to be sure. But it's probably more than that, since it turns on the sometimes conflicted but always affectionate relationships between three friends - Pigoil, Milou and Jacky - all struck head on by unemployment (a consequence of the 30's financial crisis) - as well as Douce a pretty young girl from the provinces who has come to Paris looking to hit it big and Monsieur Radio, an aging musician whose unhappy love affair has led him to withdraw from the world around him.
It's the end of 1935, on the eve of the new year and the setting is a working class neighborhood in Paris - a neighborhood dreamed up for us by Christophe Barratier drawing on Montmartre and Ménilmontant, two former villages annexed by the capital, which they overlook from atop their modest hillsides. This imaginary town, where a provincial life can still be lived in its entirety is perceived in sumptuous panoramic shots and through several luxurious and decadent cabaret scenes.
While the Paris quarter in the film is surely a product of Christophe Barratier's poetic fantasy, it nevertheless reflects an historic reality. Paris, at the time, did indeed possess dozens of small concert venues and especially vaudevill music halls. These popular pleasure centers also drew a part of their patrons from industrial quarters, thus forming a vast admixture where social barriers have not yet been set up.
France in 1936 also marked the explosion of the "POPULAR FRONT." In the spring of 1936, the poorest classes of French society sweep aside the old political guard of a French republic riddled with financial scandals and immoral manuvering. Answering this groundswell of support mustered by leftist - socialist, communist and anarchist - a violent reaction was organized among the right-wing nationalists, openly fascinated by the triumphant examples of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany. That reaction is represented in Paris 36 by the S.O.C., a fascist-leaning quasi-military militia.
It is in that historical context that our three friends join together and try to revive the dream of the old Chansonia theater, threatened with demolition. Three comrades with a passion for music, love and liberty will make their stand there, attempting to strike down the ambient brown plague, that hulking beast which has already spread through Europe and which is about to drag the entire world with it into the grips of war.