Crainquebille

A gaunt costermonger, Jean-Baptiste Crainquebille, trundles his barrow through the pre-dawn halflight of Les Halles, hawking carrots and leeks to ghosts of market women whose breath curls like ectoplasm. One July noon, a bored constable demands the peddler’s license; the old man’s quip—“I’ve been selling here since you were in swaddling clothes, monsieur”—earns him ten seconds of handcuffed humiliation, a night in a reeking cell, and a magistrate who signs the catastrophe with the same flourish he uses to approve lunch expenses. From the courtroom’s walnut paneling to the prison’s iron bowels, the film charts the slow transmutation of a mild-mannered soul into a bruised relic: his cart repossessed, his coins swallowed by court fees, his name reduced to dossier number 14,372. Released into Parisian twilight, he shuffles past cafés where patrons once greeted him, now crossing the street to avoid the stench of penal sulfur clinging to his coat. In the film’s most lacerating passage, hunger drives him to contemplate theft—a crime he has never imagined—only to be saved by a fragile street urchin who offers half a stolen brioche, proving that mercy can sprout even in the cracks of administrative concrete. The final tableau—Crainquebille reclaiming his barrow at dawn, eyes hollow yet undefeated—suggests not redemption but the bitter perpetuity of the poor: tomorrow they will arrest him again, tomorrow the carrots will rot, tomorrow the guillotine of paperwork will fall, yet the wheels must keep rolling because the city must breakfast.