Screenplay: Les Enfants du Paradis

Overview
Les Enfants du Paradis unfolds on the bustling Boulevard du Crime in early 19th-century Paris, a vivid stage for a story of love, jealousy, and art. At the center stands Garance, a luminous, free-spirited woman whose beauty and independence make her the object of obsession for four very different men. The screenplay traces their rivalries and entanglements over years, using the theater world as both setting and metaphor for the roles people play in love and life.
The narrative moves between backstage bustle and street performance, between passion's private cruelties and the public spectacle of the stage. It keeps one foot in everyday Paris and the other in the heightened, ritualized world of actors and mimes, where gestures and silence convey as much as words.

Main characters
Garance is enigmatic and untamable, capable of warmth and yet resolutely resistant to ownership. Her refusal to be a prize sets the story's conflicts in motion. Baptiste, a humble and devoted mime, feels a deep, often wordless love for her; his art and his devotion are inseparable. Frédérick Lemaître, a charismatic romantic actor, embodies theatrical arrogance and longing, pursuing Garance with the confidence of a star. Pierre François Lacenaire, a poet-criminal, brings a darker, intellectual intensity, while the fourth suitor represents wealth and conventional social power; each man offers Garance a different kind of life and temptation.
The ensemble of actors, theater managers, and street performers around them provides texture and commentary, reflecting how performance shapes identity. Minor characters illuminate Parisian theatrical culture and echo the central themes of mimicry, performance, and desire.

Narrative arc
The screenplay follows episodes rather than a single linear plot, lingering on moments that reveal character and motive. Scenes shift from comic to tragic, from intimate conversations to crowded performances, mapping years of pursuit and rejection. Garance drifts through these episodes with a mixture of curiosity and stubborn autonomy, alternately drawn to and repelled by the men who adore her.
Baptiste's devotion is the emotional anchor: his silent, expressive craft as a mime mirrors the restraint of his romantic longing. Frédérick's flamboyant passions and Lacenaire's dangerous charisma create rivalries that blossom into jealousy, violence, and moral reckoning. The world of the theater, rehearsals, cheap cafés, dressing rooms, and packed auditoriums, becomes the crucible where love is tested and choices have consequences, often bittersweet.
The ending is both a personal resolution and a meditation on the persistence of performance: lives are altered, relationships are fractured, and yet the show on the Boulevard du Crime goes on. The concluding moments leave a sense of loss tempered by the enduring power of art to transform grief into narrative.

Themes and style
Prévert's screenplay blends romantic fatalism with humanist warmth, making passion and theatricality twin lenses for examining freedom and possession. The text explores how people enact roles to survive and to seduce, and how authenticity is both pursued and performed. Silence and gesture, especially through the figure of the mime, become as eloquent as speech, underlining the screenplay's interest in nonverbal truth.
Stylistically, the writing alternates lyricism and everyday detail, sketching a Paris that is at once romanticized and palpably alive. Theatrical metaphors saturate the dialogue, and episodic structure allows characters to be observed from multiple angles. Ultimately, Les Enfants du Paradis celebrates art's capacity to endure beyond individual desires, while grieving the impossible wish that love might be simple and belonging absolute.