There's more than one reason to be utterly disappointed by this movie teaming Carné & Prévert & Trauner & Kosma again so soon after Les Enfants du Paradis.
Where to begin to describe this failure to follow up with the previous year's masterpiece? The characters are all wooden and no one has a story that gets the movie started. The best in my opinion is the character played by Serge Reggiani, the worst is the one played by Nathalie Nattier whose acting is horrendous. Anyway the love story between her character and Montand's is melodramatic in the worst sense. Montand is OK though but eventually he is as much at a loss as we are, trying to get through the story. As for the other characters they are quite colorful thus they get too much exposition which proves detrimental to the building up of a core narrative.
Sad misfire... how could they go so far downhill? I suppose it's the classic spell of bad ideas piling up to give a very bad result. A character embodying Destiny? OK that's poetic but the rest of the story unfolds in a very serious background: post-Liberation Paris with patriots and traitors casually living side by side. Some aspects are poetic, others just dead serious and the love story in between is simply stuck in a no-man's-land, non-existent. Very sad to say with the benefit of hindsight that they fumbled everything as if they didn't know how to tell a story: a love story lost in a deck of vignettes of varying interest.
Well, I'd rather think of what they could have done with the Montand character investigating in the underworld to find his fiancée or maybe escaping his fate, in line with Gabin's character in Quai des brumes. Or if they had made a dark comedy like Drôle de drame with people reuniting after the war, trying to know what each other did under German rule in order to find an upright (and innocent) new family leader to eventually hide their consciences (and ill-acquired fortunes) behind him.
