1939, France, directed by Julien Duvivier It's impossible not to place La Fin du jour in the framework of the end of an era: the film's elegiac quality, not to mention its title, make clear that we're witnessing the conclusion of something precious, something that, as it passes, will transform the world as we've known it. The film was released in France in March 1939, when war was already in the air, and the last hopes raised by the Popular Front government were disappearing into the wind; the film prominently features the song "Le Temps des cérises", emblematic of the French left since the days of the Paris Commune, in one scene that recalls the emotional rendition of the "Marseillaise" in Casablanca (there was even a film with the title Le Temps des cérises in 1937, directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois, one of Jean Renoir's collaborators). Duvivier directed another of the key Popular Front films, La Belle équipe, a few years earlier - a film famous, or perhaps infamous, for its alternate endings; there's no similar ambiguity in the conclusion of La Fin du jour.
Duvivier was at the top of the directing game in the 1930s, as the cast lists from his films attest, and La Fin du jour is overflowing with on-camera talent, with a gallery of treasurable character actors crowned by the trio of Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet and Victor Francen (the only weakness is perhaps the young actor who plays Simon's unlikely boy scout pal). The three are brought together in a home for old actors - many of the supporting cast look as though they might have been residents of just such an establishment - where the jealousies, the triumphs and the despair of careers on or near the boards come back to haunt them.
That's not to say that there's anything mechanical about the film, however: these characters aren't simply types but complex personalities, striving to overcome grief or disappointment, or even edging close to insanity after a lifetime of betrayal and self-deception, with the main actors setting even the hint of vanity aside when they portray their characters' more unpleasant tendencies. Still, there's an almost overwhelming sense that they can still preserve something worth saving, something worth the setting aside of petty differences; it's not hard to read the home, threatened from all sides, as a metaphor for the country, and Simon's character, laced with self-delusion and schadenfreude as he is, as the salt-of-the-earth Frenchman willing to make the sacrifices needed to preserve that country. 
It's remarkable that the English- and French-speaking cinemas produced, almost simultaneously, two actors as similar as Michel Simon and Charles Laughton, two larger-than-life men who became the unlikeliest of stars in a medium that valued rugged good looks, and both had the ability to play characters far beyond their years: here, Simon plays a man at the end of his life, and he looks the part, yet he was in his early 40s when the film was made, and he was more than capable of casting off the years again when required (he looks far younger in the same year's Fric-Frac). Simon has a magnificent speech, conveying much of what the film implies is worth fighting for, in the middle of the film: each word is perfectly timed, balanced just on the right side of sentimentality. Victor Francen matches him beat for beat at the end, delivering a wonderfully wry and unexpected elegy, a final twist in a battle of wills that somehow seems entirely appropriate.(These comments follow from David Cairns's admirable attempt to bring La Fin du jour back into public view via his magnificent Duvivier giveaway; you can proceed here for further discussion. Thanks again for your initiative, David!).
Denis's use of sound is especially interesting: it's as though the volume has been turned right up to emphasize the mundane, to further stress the contrast between the voiceover and the world on the screen. As the film progresses, Denis manages to extract a kind of poetry from that soundtrack, just as, later, she finds something hypnotically beautiful in the repeated work that her characters do with the fighting cocks that are at the heart of the film's narrative; there's a real tenderness to those interactions, but also a non-judgmental fascination, on the director's part, with work done by human hands (the scenes are as absorbing as those which depict more conventional artisanal talents in Claude Sautet's 
Denis's film is set on the margins in every possible sense: it takes place on Paris's southern fringe, near Rungis, the town best-known for its gigantic food market (blood-smeared butchers feature among the customers at the cock-fighting ring, though the audience is by no means restricted to working class spectators); its main characters exist on the fringes of the law; and the central duo, Dah (Isaach de Bankolé) and Jocelyn (Alex Descas) are from Benin and the French Antilles respectively, and thus cut off from their roots. Within the world of the film, their marginalization is often expressed by their silence; while we see them converse with one another, forming an almost brotherly bond, and we hear Dah's commentary in voiceover, they only rarely intervene when there are white characters present, with their boss (played by Jean-Claude Brialy) doing much of the talking on their behalf. 
Given the set-up, it's not difficult to discern the likely direction of the story, but Denis is less interested in the narrative outcome than in creating a richly detailed portrait of the physical and psychological realities of her two central characters, and perhaps in challenging perceptions of what we deem to be culturally acceptable. At times, it feels as though we're watching a documentary about the underworld (both criminal and literal, since the two central characters live far beneath the ground), notwithstanding the presence of recognizable actors (de Bankolé, Descas and Brialy are all excellent, the latter mining an unpleasant vein not normally seen in his work), an underworld that's otherwise too easily ignored.
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