Louis Daquin, the Straight Shooter

The cinéma of Louis Daquin: an œuvre of the people, in which community and solidarity reign supreme.

Louis Daquin was born in 1908 and died in 1980. This filmmaker, whose career was intrinsically linked to a specific period in French history, the occupation, chose to put his spirit as a left-wing activist at the heart of his work. Assistant director to Julien Duvivier, Abel Gance and notably the free-spirited and oneiric Jean Grémillon, Daquin understood that cinema was an often-poetic adventure that cannot exude light without darkness. In the 1940s, he directed his own films and joined the Resistance in the name of the French Communist Party. While fighting the occupation, he crafted a secular cinema that demonstrated how a quest for riches leads only to emptiness, while the collective spirit of solidarity can amend the characters’ destinies. He was interested in proving that the world of social classes can be transcended through a shared respect for the values of hard work, camaraderie and courage. It is therefore no surprise that, in Daquin’s world, we encounter admirable workers, scoundrels, young lovers and children capable of anything.

Portrait of Innocence, filmed in 1941, exhibits how children fight to save one of their own in an ode to freedom. The All Saints’ Day Traveller  (1943), co-written with Marcel Aymé adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, paints a brutal and heart-wrenching portrait of a “bourgeois family in a city like La Rochelle,” as Daquin described it at the time. The Bouquinquant  Brothers  (1947) is a romantic drama set against the backdrop of the upper classes and domestic life, whereas The Mark of the Day  (1949) portrays a community of miners caught between hope and persistence.

Daquin’s films thus encompass all genres: fables, crime thrillers, period adaptations of literary works and naturalistic social dramas. Men and women characters are rendered with equality in terms of esteem and contempt, depending on the story. The Opportunists, made later in 1960, is a ruthless adaptation of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, which tells the tale of an unscrupulous man who loses his soul in pursuit of social success. A tireless advocate for the human cause, Louis Daquin, through his films, revealed humanity’s pitiful missteps and, above all, its sublime moments of inspiration.

Virginie Apiou