France – R. Emmet Sweeney

Black Sheep: Mon Oncle (1958)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 26, 2017

“That would be the ideal film. I would like people to see Hulot less and less and to see other people or characters more and more.” – Jacques Tati

With Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Tati gets closer to making his ideal film. The character of Hulot gets pushed further and further into the background until he often disappears, letting nearly everyone else in town take center stage. Hulot’s role is to set a disastrous mechanism into motion, then stroll offscreen with charming obliviousness. He is inimical to the quickly modernizing world of the film, able to find the flaw in any advanced doohickey and reduce it to a smoking, blubbering mess in a matter of minutes. Hulot is forever putting the brakes on technological advancement, while the rest of his family is installing the latest and greatest in household tech, from a motion-sensor garage door to a fish water fountain. While his family tries to automate and smooth out their lives, Hulot prefers to live in the grit and grime, in an old rickety house covered in dust and layered with history. Tati uses set and sound design to separate Hulot from his contemporaries, going from the squeaky clean lines of his sister’s ultra-modern home to the clatteringly labyrinthine staircase of his apartment building. Hulot is a man of out of time, trying to impart his destabilizing spirit to his little nephew, the only relative susceptible to his charms.

Mon Oncle opens and closes with scenes of stray dogs fanning out into an alley, eating garbage, urinating and making the world their home. The title appears in chalk on a brick wall, as if this was a post-apocalyptic thriller rather than a slapstick comedy. But all of Tati’s films have this “out-of-time” feeling, since Tati himself felt so upset about the massive re-development changing the French cityscape. Tati told Bert Cardullo (quoted in World Directors in Dialogue): “What bothers me today is that Paris itself is being destroyed. This really aggravates me. If we need additional housing, and God knows we do, let’s build new cities. There is enough room. But we should not demolish nice old buildings in Paris for the sake of new apartment buildings. Paris will end up looking like Hamburg. And it is uniformity that I dislike.” And it is uniformity that he skewers relentlessly in his design of Charles and Madame Arpel’s home (Hulot’s brother-in-law and sister played by Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie), a boxy glass-walled modern edifice in which everything is connected but nothing functions. It is an especially dour place for Hulot’s nephew Gérard (Alain Bécourt), who finds few places to play in the ascetic setup. Even the backyard is landscaped to an inch within its life, and one hopscotches over it rather than walks through it.

It is Tati’s first film released in color (he shot Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday [1953] in color but it was distributed in B&W), and he uses it to further establish a sense of place. The Arpel home is weak pastel, gray-blue with a smidge of green in the yard. Rather institutional in its color scheme. Hulot’s neighborhood though, is all earth tones, what Tati called, “old, velvety colors.” Hulot lives in what seems like a simulacrum of a small French village, on which probably no longer existed when Tati made the film. But he is a nostalgist for this kind of place, having fond memories of going to delis with his grandmother, “there was some sawdust on the floor, they cut us some thin slices of salami to give us a taste of it, the room smelled deliciously of oak and pepper.” Today, Tati said, “when you go to a restaurant it’s as if you were eating in a clinic.” Hulot’s home is a remarkable construction meant to channel these childhood memories. It is shot head-on in long shot, so when Hulot descends the stairs we can make out his entire journey from top-to-bottom in one sequence, tracking his progress through windows and balconies, his bopping head giving him away. This kind of “dollhouse” shot is one that Wes Anderson liberally borrowed in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

This set is not just that one trick-shot though, it is a living organism that Hulot has to manipulate to keep people happy. In order to make a caged bird sing it’s morning song, he has to manipulate one of his windows so it reflects a beam of sun onto the animal – only then will it start its song. And every day upon departure he provides the girl on the bottom floor with candy or a kind word (by the end of the film she’s grown from a tween to an adolescent while his nephew never seemed to age at all – time does strange things in Hulot’s world). Hulot is always leaving the apartment to pick up Gérard from school. Gérard is a cooped up kid who has found an escape with his ne’er do well uncle and a group of prankster kids. Their favorite routine is to wait for a pedestrian to walk near a lamp post, whistle as if calling them and betting on whether they will run into the post.

Eventually though, Hulot has to take the boy home, and the construction of that home is one of Tati’s great achievements, a totem to conspicuous consumption without a thought to functionality. And Tati uses sound design to activate multiple levels of the screen space. In one segment Madame Arpel is complimenting a neighbor on her hat in the foreground, while in the background Gérard is cleaning his shoes on the welcome mat, that scraping sound nearly blotting out his mother’s conversation. Everything in a Tati frame matters, there is no centering character. While your eye automatically drifts to Hulot, since Tati is such a master of pantomime, he often wanders out of frame, so you are forced to find other jokes – like the two circular windows that look like eyelid-less eyes, or the great sucking sound of the fish fountain, which Madame Arpel turns on and off depending on the importance of the guest. There is a whole rhythm to the house’s apparatus, the fountain “sucking,” the front door buzz, the soft “thunk” of a glass door closing, one might be able to map the comings and goings of each character just based on the sound design.

Needless to say when they have a dinner party Hulot starts breaking down the Arpel’s much sought-after order. He does the same at the rubber hose factory they get him a job at – the hose ends up looking like sausage, the disposal of which is an adventure on its own. There are so many visual gags, layered into each intricately arrayed sequence, it’s almost enough to be distracted by the solitude of it all. For while Hulot was the center of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, here he seems more peripheral, his final expulsion a natural extension of the plot. The final images, rather touching ones, find Charles and his son Gérard ultimately bonding over the lamp post prank. What had been a completely combative relationship has softened in a shared bond over slapstick violence. But Hulot is gone, and they don’t miss him.

Summer Daze: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 19, 2017

The first screen appearance of Jacques Tati’s Hulot character is inside of a car: a clattering, jittering wreck making its way to a seaside hotel in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953). Tati cuts from the sound of a train horn to the pitter-putter of Hulot’s gasping car engine as it turns the corner of a country lane. The train is carrying the middle-class vacationers to their summer home, but Hulot always travels his own circuitous path. He yearns to be part of the group, but is forever getting sidetracked, by everything from funerals to fireworks. The character of Hulot, established here and elaborated on in three more films (Mon Oncle [1958], Playtime [1967] and Trafic [1970]), is baffled by modern technology and remains continually tangled up in it, reaching an apotheosis in the shimmering urban Hulot-trap of Playtime. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is a gentler affair, though it establishes the unsteadiness and peculiar launching qualities of his springlike body. Like his car, he is as unsteady as a reed in a wind, and the slightest stumble will launch him into the next zip code. But he will always circle back home, hoping to get a few moments’ peace before getting launched once again.

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was shot in St. Marc-sur-mer in Brittany, on France’s northwestern coast. It was, and reportedly still is, a sleepy seaside resort town – you can still rent rooms in the same (extensively remodeled) Hotel de la Plage, now part of the Best Western chain. Tati shot on location during the summer and autumn of 1952, with the crew staying at the hotel. It remained open to the public, so if you were staying there during that year, you probably made it into the film as an extra. The rest of the cast was filled with relative unknowns (Lucien Fregis as the hotel manager) or acquaintances (Nathalie Pascaud, who plays the young blond Martine, was a friend of a friend). As with Jour de fête(1949), which I wrote about last week, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday doesn’t have much of a plot, but instead is a series of vignettes documenting a day in the town, slices of life that are then shredded by Hulot’s bumblings and stumblings (Tati made multiple edits to the feature, the final cut in 1978 – the original 1953 cut is offered as a bonus feature on FilmStruck).

The film begins, not with Hulot, but with a visual gag at a train station. A group of heavily packed vacationers wait on a middle platform. A noisy unintelligible voice on the intercom starts babbling, and the group, as one amorphous blob, runs to the platform at the bottom of the screen. But then a train starts rolling in at the platform at the top of the screen, and so on and so forth until the rabble finally gets on their train of choice. Shot with a static locked camera, Tati makes the train station look alien, almost inhuman, and the vacationers like a panicked mob. Later, a packed bus ride gets the same treatment – it is so filled with humanity a little boy is sitting inside the opening in the steering wheel. Compared to that, Hulot’s shivering little car doesn’t seem so embarrassing. He putters along at his own pace, breaking down every few miles, sure, but he’s not packed in like sardines. In these travel sequences you can really appreciate Tati’s manipulation of the soundtrack, the cut from a train horn to Hulot’s clattering car immediately emphasizes its fragility and its unconventional nature. The car sounds like it has emphysema, whereas the train is all brawn and strength.

When Hulot finally levers his reedy body out of the vehicle and into the hotel, it is already full with social circles fully formed, and it is near impossible for him to ingratiate himself. And it is here we first see Hulot in full, with the peaked cap, bobbing pipe and that angled, bouncing walk. Biographer David Bellos describes Hulot’s posture as a “‘corporeal structure’ vaguely reminiscent of Giacometti’s spidery lines.” He is spread out in all directions but somehow with a solid center of gravity. Then there is that unchangeable expression on his face which scholar Michel Chion described as “indefinable, somewhere between worry, stupidity, and polite neutrality.”

In the early going Hulot cannot manage the space of the hotel, he is just spilling all over the place. Each door he opens lets in a gale force wind, as if a twister had hit in the lobby. At check-in the tobacco in his pipe is so overflowing the hotel manager has to pluck it out of his mouth so he can speak. This is just the first of endless incursions into other people’s personal space. Even when he’s alone he annoys – during the post-dinnertime lull, he sits alone and plays an absurdly loud jazz record, jolting everyone out of their restful state. Hulot, both by accident and by design, is something of a prankster, so the only people who gravitate towards him are a little boy who gives him a run for his money at ping-pong, and the young beauty Martine, for whom Hulot is a charming respite from incessant male flirtation (from both insufferable Marxists and capitalists alike).

The most moving vignette depicts a scantily attended masked ball – there are a few children napping in their seats, Hulot and Martine. Hulot shows up in an elaborate pirate outfit, while Martine swoops in wearing a mask and skirt. She enters while he is futzing with the record player behind a curtain – and, just before she is about to depart, he emerges, and they giddily dance around the empty room. It is a moment when the two souls in the town seeking adventure have found each other, and Hulot does not stumble or collapse. In fact he is quite nimble as they skip around the dance floor. It is a short-lived moment, but an exquisite one, showing that the Hulot character, though aloof and oblivious to the world so much of the time, is capable of joining it in full when he discovers someone with the same out-of-step sensibility. It is a transitory moment, and Hulot is swept along by his own momentum as he crashes a funeral, and in the final spectacular stunt, sets off a whole shed of fireworks in a display of sublime idiocy. He ends the summer with a bang, but leaves much as he began, alone in that fussy old car. He gives Martine’s empty room one final look (she left without a goodbye), and drives offscreen, leaving us with an image of the emptied out town. It ends with a stamp being placed on a picture, turned into a postcard, a memory Hulot will keep close to his heart during the further solitary adventures that await him.

The Postman: Jour de Fête (1949)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 12, 2017

After a decade-long career as a music-hall performer, Jacques Tati transitioned to feature filmmaking witha comedy about a remarkably gullible postman. Before Tati invented the iconic bumbling bourgeois Hulot (in M. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953), he experimented with a clumsy working class letter carrier, prone to insecure bouts of drinking and falling flat on his face. Jour de fête (1949) exhibits Tati’s elastic expertise at mime, including a tour-de-force drunk bike ride, as well as displaying his immediate talents as a director, constructing brilliantly funny gags through choreography and sound design. All of the gags generate from a small town’s resistance to and obsession with technological advancement, especially as trumpeted by the Americans. Tati eyes all this talk of modernization with a gimlet eye, preferring instead to linger on the absurdities of small town life before they disappear forever.

Having made a name for himself on the music hall circuit, Tati made his way into short films, and gained some notoriety under René Clément, who directed him in the boxing comedy Soigne ton gauche (1936, for which Godard punned on the title for his Keep Your Right Up/Soigne ta droite). It was in this short that Tati took note of the bicycle riding postman played by Max Martel. This character would be the inspiration for his 1947 script The School For Postmen (1947), though in the interim he would be trying to avoid the German occupation government forces, who were seeking him out to work in Berlin for the Nazi organization “Strength Through Joy” as part of the compulsory work service. Instead he ditched them and hid out in the middle of the country in Le Marembert, four miles from Sainte-Sévère, which would be the location of Jour de fête. Tati and his friend Henri Marquet (a co-writer/actor in Jour de fête) chose Le Marembert as a town to hide out in because, Tati’s daughter explains in the documentary A L’Americaine (also on FilmStruck as a supplement to Jour de fête), “They jabbed a pencil into a map of France, Sainte-Sévère is smack in the middle.”

Tati himself continued that “once there, I was surprised. It was wartime, but in Sainte-Sévère, you’d never have known it. It’s fantastic to see people who know how to live. I thought if I made a film one day, I’d shoot it there.” He would stay true to his word, and retained the image of Max Martel’s postman. This would lead to the 1947 short The School For Postmen, a trial run for Jour de fête, in which his bicycling letter carrier is obsessed with proving that he can deliver the mail as fast as modern American technology allows. Originally slated to be directed by René Clément, his dropping out allowed Tati the opportunity to get behind the camera. And it was this experience that led him to believe he could extend this character out to feature length. He shot from May to December of 1947 in Sainte-Sévère, using it as his outdoor set. It was to be shot in a new color process called Thomsoncolor, but it was unstable and acceptable prints could not be struck. So it was distributed in B&W and that is how it is widely known today. However, in 1964 Tati did a re-edit with some painted in color by his friend Paul Grimault, and in 1994 a full color version was struck from the original negatives. All three versions are available to view on FilmStruck.

The story, such as it is, involves the fair coming into to Sainte-Sévère and upsetting the natural tempo of the town. The café owner starts re-painting all his tables and chairs, a tad upsetting to his newly stained patrons, while one of the carnies flirts with one of the local girls. Through these side stories stumbles the insecure postman François (Tati), who endures spitballs from the local kids and endless gibes and pranks from the adults, mostly egging him into drinking games. Too eager to please to ever really object or fight back, he instead complains softly to himself. His track through town becomes an obstacle course of townspeople, carnies and kids all trying to distract him or rile him up, and he either ends up blackout drunk in a train car or roped into helping out someone else with their work (setting up a flagpole, cleaning up farmland, fixing a player piano). These are all intricately arranged set pieces that choreograph a whole village in motion (while the camera remains fairly static). The movement in the frame is never ending, and Tati is ever-eager to cede the frame to a better punchline, whether it’s the cross-eyed spike-driver (he needs to be positioned just a bit to the side) or the hunchbacked old gossip who fills in the details of every nook and cranny of the neighborhood; this 90 minutes feature somehow maps the whole town while also finding time to sketch each individual personality.

What François values above all is his job, so when he views a newsreel of all the new U.S. postal delivery technology, from helicopter drops to automated sorting machines, he blows a gasket and tries to prove he can match the Americans’ speed with his own two-wheeler. What ensues is nothing less than a Buster Keaton-esque study in human transportation gone awry, like in Sherlock Jr. (1924) when he loses his driver and rides a motorcycle side-saddle to a series of death-defying near misses. In Tati’s case he just loses his bicycle, which starts riding down the road on its own, as if possessed by a demon. Tati chases it down as if his life depended on it because his reputation hinges upon this mere mode of transportation. His bike goes through all forms of indignities – losing wheels, getting caught on a railroad crossing gate, getting dunked in a river. But it’s all for the greater good (or so François believes), of delivering the mail with speed, “American-style,” he keeps saying. So he is sticking the mail in grain sorters, shoving it on a butcher’s cutting board (which swiftly gets chopped), and sticking it under a horse’s tail. No time for customer service, as long as the mail gets delivered, no matter the condition, he will be satisfied. That is, until he can move no more, and the old hunchback drags him out of the water and tells him, “News is rarely good, so let it take its sweet time.”

Tati prefers the town stay as it is. But his depiction is already old-fashioned, as these towns became more mechanized, less personable. And so he had found a theme that would carry him through the films to follow, though he would need a new character, one more upwardly mobile to explore the ever dehumanized city, if not less prone to pratfalls. So Monsieur Hulot was born: the latest, and certainly the most oblivious cog in the industrial machine.

The World’s a Stage: The Golden Coach (1953)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

August 29, 2017

The Golden Coach (1953) begins with a red curtain raising on a stage, the camera pushing in until the edges of the theater disappear and the story proper begins. Jean Renoir’s feature about an Italian theatrical troupe setting up shop in Peru foregrounds its artificiality, a play within the film that is a performance for our benefit. Near the end the troupe’s star actress asks, “where does theater end and life begin?” a question Renoir had been asking since his beginnings in cinema. It is a question without an answer, but indicates the space in which Renoir prefers to operate, within that intersection where playfulness and improvisation meet the social structures that try to contain them. The Golden Coach focuses on Camilla (Anna Magnani), a dynamic stage presence who bewitches three of Peru’s most eligible bachelors, but cannot decide who she ultimately desires. She can only find clarity while on stage, and heartache off of it. So in an extraordinary conclusion, the film makes an argument for perpetual performance, instead of turning your life into art, make art of your life, regardless of the consequences.

Following the completion and success of The River (1951), which I wrote about here, Renoir was eager to get another project off the ground, preferably one where he could do a similar job of location shooting. After many starts and stops, including a drawn-out pre-production on a never made adaptation of Camus’s The Stranger, he received an offer from producer Robert Dorfmann, with a project ready to shoot. It was an adaptation of Prosper Merimee’s Carrosse Saint-Sacrement, which had been in development with Luchino Visconti, who had left after arguments over the script. Anna Magnani had already been cast in the leading role and production money had been lined up, so Renoir agreed, with the understanding it would be shot in dual French and English versions, and have some location shooting performed in Italy and Mexico. After some reshuffling of the budget, it turned out it would only be shot in English, which Magnani could only speak phonetically, and it would be shot entirely in studio.

Renoir reluctantly adapted to the lessened circumstances, and it’s quite possible having more authentic locales would have worked against the film’s ode to artificiality. But though it worked out artistically, the director complained mightily beforehand, and was also struggling with a wound in his leg that had become infected. This delayed shooting for months, and in the meantime he had growing doubts about his star, writing to producer Prince Francesco Alliata that (as quoted in Jean Renoir: A Biography, by Pascal Merigeau), “In my discussions with her, I’ve had the impression that Anna didn’t understand my screenplay. Moreover, she has had so much work that she wasn’t able to work seriously on her English. That represents such a handicap that I feel discouraged about it already.” But despite all of these pains, worries, and concerns, filming “made him forget his weariness and fatigue, and then he would display a staggering amount of energy, carried away as he was by the pleasure of making films, the enthusiasm of those around him, and his confidence in the film he was making.”

Renoir’s treatment of the Merimee play is very fanciful – the play takes place entirely in a Viceroy’s office and runs barely over an hour. Renoir pushed it more in the direction of the burlesque libretto by Meilhac and Halevy, from which came Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera La Perichole. The story concerns a troupe of Italian actors who are traveling to the New World, landing in Peru to put on some shows. Their lead actress is Camilla (Anna Magnani), a magnetic performer who draws men’s attentions regardless of their station. Spanish officer Felipe (Paul Campbell) had followed her from Europe, making the journey along with a garish golden coach. The coach is intended for Viceroy Ferdinand (Duncan Lamont), who hopes to deploy it as a symbol of Spanish power. But instead it becomes a pawn in his affections for Camilla, after he sees her bewitching performance in the palace. And finally there is the local top toreador named Ramon (Riccardo Rioli), a handsome brute who charms with his straightforward style. Camilla juggles the three men around until they are all ready to snap. The Viceroy is close to getting usurped by an aghast clergy, newly spiritual Felipe wants her to run away to India and Ramon simply wants to manhandle her. But Camilla cannot choose, they each offer her varied parts for her to play, so instead they engage in an increasingly frenetic farce in which she keeps stashing men in different rooms until they stumble upon each other and erupt in jealous swordfights. Camilla will either have to choose a man to settle down with or just stay true to her inauthentic self and continue to perform for everyone.

The closing sequences are a tour de force for Magnani, who overcame all of Renoir’s fears. Though not fluent in English, she managed to speak it well phonetically (as she did in Bellissima, 1951), and at 44 years of age is more than enough woman for all of the male actors of the film combined. In the final sequence she first plays a willowy pushover to flatter Ramon’s battering ram approach, then a sensitive artist to inflame Felipe’s Indian awakening (“They are better than us”) and finally a calculating manipulator with the Viceroy, trying to flirt him into a fight. But despite all her best efforts, the men discover her ruse and leave disconsolately, desolately aware none of them will be enough for her. Her one final trick is to appear as a religious penitent, donating the titular golden coach to the church to help the Viceroy out of a scrape. Camilla doesn’t seem to have a true self, but Renoir suggests that that is her glory – an acceptance of inauthenticity allows for more freedom, not less. In the final scene the troupe leader calls Camilla to the front of the stage, as she is saying goodbye to reality and returning to the theater:

Don’t waste your time in the so-called real-life. You belong to us, the actors, acrobats, mimes, clowns, mountebanks. Your only way to find happiness is on any stage, any platform, any public place, during those two little hours when you become another person, your true self.

Camilla says the names of those she has lost: Felipe, Ramon, the Viceroy. They have disappeared, become part of the audience. Does she miss them, the troupe leader asks? Magnani looks straight into the camera, and with a look of Mona Lisa-like inscrutability softly says, “a little.” It is one of the great line readings, encompassing the bone-deep sadness of abandoning her multiple loves as well as expressing the immense power she possesses by standing center stage ready to take on her next role.

This is the fourteenth and final part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

La Marseillaise (1938)

The Southerner (1945)

The River (1951)

Elena and Her Men (1956)

Picnic on the Grass (1959)

Another Day in the Country: Picnic on the Grass (1959)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

August 22, 2017

For Jean Renoir Picnic on the Grass was both a return and a departure. It was filmed in and around the country estate of Les Collettes, his late father’s land, where he had grown up as a child. It is the perfect setting for this back-to-nature comedy in which a scientist (and hopeful presidential candidate), is lured away from the world of the mind for that of the flesh. But instead of using this return to indulge in nostalgia or reiterate the naturalistic style of his still-famous triumphs – Renoir pushes further into farce and caricature. Picnic on the Grass is a broad and joyful comedy that was inevitably compared with Rules of the Game (1939) and Grand Illusion (1937), which had been restored and re-released around the same time, and so Renoir was compared to his previous self, and found wanting. Jonas Mekas, writing in The Village Voice in 1960, had a profound experience watching Picnic on the Grass and was baffled by its failure – he wrote: “I hear the critics did not like it. Who are the critics? Critics like to talk big – poor nearsighted things! They do not see beauty even when it is there.” FilmStruck presents us with another opportunity to see this beauty, so I attempted to find it there.

Picnic on the Grass was marked by the death of Gabrielle Renard, the nanny who raised Jean Renoir and became one of his father’s models. She brought Jean to see his first film in 1897 at the Palais des Nouveauté. Biographer Pascal Merigeau relates that the screening “threw him into a panic” and that Gabrielle had to rush him outside to calm down. She was a beloved figure in his life, and he devotes many tender passages to her in his memoirs, including these memorable closing lines:

As I bid farewell to the landscape of my childhood I think of Gabrielle. Certainly it was she who influenced me most of all. To her I owe Guignol and the Theatre Montmartre. She taught me to realize that the very unreality of those entertainments was a reason for examining real life. She taught me to see the face behind the mask, and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché. My farewell to childhood may be expressed in very few words: ‘Wait for me, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle passed away on February 26, 1959, and Picnic on the Grass began shooting in July in Les Collettes, where they had originally formed their bond so many years before.

Renoir had been working on the script since 1958, when he registered a 32-page treatment. The story concerns Etienne Alexis (Paul Meurisse), a television-famous scientist whose main political position is mandatory artificial insemination as a way to increase intelligence in children. Despite this frightening proposition, through complete voter apathy he is likely to be the next president of Europe. That is, until he takes a fateful picnic with his equally ascetic bride-to-be/girl scout leader Marie-Charlotte (Ingrid Nordine). A satyr-like shepherd plays his flute for his goat, conjuring up a strong wind that blows past Etienne’s party and magically juices their libidos. As friends and assistants start canoodling under the trees (reminiscent of the scene in Elena and her Men [1956] with a mass-peasant makeout session), Etienne and his new chambermaid Nénette (Catherine Rouvel) begin an extended flirtation that might bring down his entire candidacy. While his advisers continue to set-up a wedding with Marie-Charlotte, Etienne’s eyes keep roaming to Nénette, a disarmingly direct farm girl who was seeking artificial insemination because she had never found a man worth her time.

Renoir cast Catherine Rouvel after being introduced to her after a screening of Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948). She had just turned nineteen, and Pascal Merigeau believes she reminded him of Gabrielle: “Returning to Les Collettes and his father’s house, among the olive trees, on the banks of the river, Renoir recommuned with his youth, rediscovered Gabrielle’s former features and soft curves, as well as Dedee’s, his first love, in Catherine Rouvel.” There is a resemblance, at least going by Auguste Renoir’s many portraits of Gabrielle, and Rouvel dazzles in the part, presenting Nénette as supremely self-confident in her naïveté – a completely charming creation.

Now in the twilight of his career, he was struggling to secure funding for new projects, and would end up producing Picnic on the Grass himself, necessitating a lower budget and tight shooting schedule. It was filmed over 20 days, reusing the studio and crew from The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment (1959), his TV adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which he had completed earlier in the year. Precise blocking was drawn out with chalk on the floor, and the actors had to follow them. Renoir later regretted the restrictions the budget required, complaining that working in this way “kills something extremely important, which is the actor’s surprise at being faced with the scenery.”

But Renoir tended to rate his own features based on financial returns, and the film was essentially ignored upon release, and gave Renoir “a pathological distaste for all the processes relating to film or television.” But looking at it outside of the pressure cooker of Renoir’s box office expectations, it’s a film that lives in the zone between the ridiculous and the sublime, happy to look the fool in search of what Renoir valued in life – which according to this film is, in no particular order: lazing about the riverside, eating heartily and sex (preferably outside). Renoir is deeply discouraged by modernity, opening on a parody of the evening news – which spends more time on his pending nuptials than his grotesque plan for population control. It is prescient in depicting how news was sliding ever closer towards entertainment.

Renoir’s POV comes through most clearly in a monologue by a priest out on a walk, telling Etienne what he thinks about his technocratic capitalism.

“Tomorrow you’ll send us to the moon. And, pray tell, what will we do up there on the moon? Do you think we’ll be happier there than under the shade of our olive trees? Scientific dictatorship will be a fine mess. We built the Notre-Dame, we built Chartres. We covered the Earth with cathedrals and churches. You? You’re covering it with factories. You must admit that the smoke from our incense is less damaging to the atmosphere than your atomic radiations. It appears that men enjoy being poisoned.

But, as Renoir well knows, whether or not he disapproves of the flow of history, it will flow on anyway, so you might as well get pleasure where you can. So Etienne and Nénette find themselves in each other, and that will have to be enough.

This is the thirteenth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, sixteen of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

La Marseillaise (1938)

The Southerner (1945)

The River (1951)

Elena and Her Men (1956)

The French Revolution: La Marseillaise (1938)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney5 Comments

July 18, 2017

“It took me some time to understand that, for him, ideas had little meaning in themselves, and that all that mattered in his eyes was the personality of the individual expressing them.” – Alain Renoir on his father

La Marseillaise (1938) was made under intense political pressure, both from the censorious right and the Popular Front left, who partially funded this depiction of the French Revolution. Jean Renoir ended up making a film that pleased neither, depicting not the broad strokes of history but the idiosyncrasies of its individual actors. As Andre Bazin put it, Renoir “demythologizes history by restoring it to man.” It obscures the larger political movements but pauses for details like how the soldiers pad their boots or what Louis XVI thinks of tomatoes (he’s pro). After the supernova success of Grand Illusion (1937) Renoir had big plans to capture a larger panorama of the revolution, but kept whittling it down to a few engaging personalities, until we are left with a couple of hotheaded revolutionary Marseilles comrades and the aloofly charming Louis XVI (Pierre Renoir), who seems oblivious to the power shift happening right outside his doors. And yes, this marks the triumphant (?) return of my Jean Renoir series, which will run through August.

The film was proposed to and supported by the French Communist Party and the national trade union CGT (Confederation generale du travail), to be produced with Henri Jeanson. The original funding scheme was like a proto-Kickstarter, as posters and leaflets proclaimed that “for the first time, a film will be sponsored by the people themselves through a vast subscription drive.” Ambitious (and impossible) goals were set, like having teams of writers creating dialogue for different sections of the country. Jeanson and others would write for the Paris inner suburbs, while Marcel Pagnol was to write dialogues between Robespierre and Brissot. These never came to pass. Renoir and Jeanson would air their concept of the film in public meetings with Popular Front representatives, which were composed of “a hundred socialists, a hundred Communists, a hundred Radicals.” They all offered differing criticisms, one wanted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen read at the open, another was opposed to the title, while a third insisted upon a happy ending. Their suggestions were duly ignored.

They received 50,000 francs from the CGT, and 20,000 from the Union des syndicats, not nearly enough for a feature as sprawling as the one they were planning. So in the end, the feature was very traditionally funded by the production company Les Realisations d’art cinematographie (RAC), represented by Albert Pinkovitch, who had supported Grand Illusion. He pre-sold La Marseillaise for a million francs to various European and North African distributors, and Renoir received a guaranteed 400,000 francs. Jeanson considered this a betrayal, and held a grudge against Renoir for the rest of their natural lives. But it is highly unlikely they would have raised enough money through the CGT and other Popular Front groups to ever make the film.

It begins in the summer of 1789 as the King is informed of the storming of the Bastille. We see nothing of the dramatic event, only Pierre Renoir as Louis XVI, chowing down on his chicken and cheerily discussing the day’s hunt. In his appealing doofiness he recalls Hugh Laurie’s Wooster (from the BBC Jeeves and Wooster [1990-1993] adaptations). He is something of an imbecile, but is so unselfconscious it becomes charming. In 1790 Marseilles the townspeople start hearing about the storming of the Bastille and the formation of a revolutionary volunteer army. What passes for central characters are two of these villagers, the mason Bomier (Edmond Ardisson) and a toll clerk named Arnaud (Andrex). Bomier is hotheaded and impulsive, while Arnaud is the more calculating intellect, in touch with the shifting political alliances happening in Paris. Both sign up for the army and march to Paris, where they get into scrapes with some Royalists while reluctantly facing up to the fact that this will not be a bloodless war. For much of the film’s running time the revolution seems like a lark, a thrilling adventure for two poor kids, an excuse to travel the country. But during the storming of the Tuileries Palace blood starts to get shed, and the two men witness what it means to be collateral damage to your principles.

Renoir, though known for his brilliance with character, was also a master of screen space, and there are some remarkable battle sequences. You can see it in the first shot, guards twirling in diagonals across the screen, that Renoir can make soldiering look dynamic. The Tuileries sequence shifts on a dime from the thrill of comradeship, of the national guard joining the Marseilles volunteers, to the inhuman lineup of gun barrels positioned out of windows, as men are cut down like bags of flour dropping out of a delivery truck. It is striking how that switch registers, from the chaos of celebration, of embraces and chatter, to the rigid order of the war machine, with its perfect geometry and deadly logic. The Marseilles volunteers are pushed out, their loose band not having the same kind of brutal logic as the Swiss regiment holding out inside.

It is the Swiss who remain because the King had been spirited out. The King watches it all like a spectator, a man already outside of time. He is concerned about the angle of his wig and the taste of a tomato as the monarchy tumbles around him. Pierre Renoir plays him with such innocence and naiveté, that it’s hard to believe it’s an act. The King might just be a lovable foe, a tool of history rather than its driver. It is a film that leaves things unfinished – the King walks out of the Tuileries, his fate uncertain. He remarks upon the state of the leaves – they are falling more quickly this year. Arnaud and Bomier split up, Bomier nursing his wounds while Arnaud disappears into the fog of war. The film ends on a note of half-hearted triumph. The Tuileries has been won, but so much has been lost, and the war is just beginning.

This is the ninth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. To read the previous entries, click below.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

La Bete Humaine (1938)

Jean Renoir: La Bete Humaine (1938)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney6 Comments

June 13, 2017

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Following the transformative success of Grand Illusion (1937), Jean Renoir suddenly had an overwhelming number of opportunities. There was an offer on the table from Samuel Goldwyn to come to Hollywood, though he delayed his route there, at least temporarily. Instead he would direct the panoramic French Revolution drama La Marseillaise (which I will write about later in my Renoir series) and our subject today, La Bête Humaine. The latter is a moody death-haunted drama adapted from the Emile Zola novel, returning to the author’s work for the first time since Nana (1926). A grimly fatalistic tale about a train engineer’s inbred compulsion to murder, and his desperate attempts to restrain it, it is graced by an iconic Jean Gabin performance that attempts to go beyond good and evil.

Though Renoir was in a position of much greater power, La Bête Humaine was another project he came onto late, after it had been developed and dropped by numerous other artists. As detailed by Pascal Merigeau in Jean Renoir: A Biography, the film had begun its life with director Marc Allégret and writer Roger Martin du Gard in 1933. Producer Philippe de Rothschild sold the screenplay to Marcel L’Herbier, who was also unable to get it off the ground. On a separate track, Jean Gabin had agreed to star in a project called Train d’enfer, as it was a long-held dream of his to drive a locomotive. Jean Gremillon and Marcel Carné successively passed on directing it, and in leaving Carné suggested that if Gabin wanted to be a train engineer, producers Robert and Raymond Hakim should just film Zola’s La Bête Humaine. In acquiring the rights they gained access to Martin du Gard’s script (he had since become much more famous since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature), which Renoir trashed upon taking over production. He wrote his script in a self-reported twelve days. Martin Du Gard moved Zola’s time period from 1869 to 1914, but Renoir’s version brought it up to contemporary times, thinking that, “such action taking place amidst trains standing on wheels high above the ground and around wooden rail cars would have lost some of its dramatic intensity….Also, because the France of today isn’t that of Napoleon III, because of the way it is now, its qualities as well as its flaws, I believe it deserves to be defended through and through by its children.”

The screaming futurism of the coal-belching iron train is integral to Renoir’s vision of the original text, which at various points he has claimed to have never read all the way through. He was probably joking, but in any case the film version places the central character, Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) in the train engineer’s cab, his face blasted with soot as he sticks his head out the window like a panting dog. Lantier has a history of depressive, violent episodes, which he ascribes to inherited guilt from his alcoholic ancestors. As the Zola quote at the head of the film says, “He felt he was paying the price for the generations of his forefathers whose drinking had poisoned his blood.” He can’t drink a drop himself, but still enters violent fugue states which he cannot control. And so he has segregated himself from society, choosing to live alone, preferring to engage with the world as a blur outside his train window.

But then he gets entangled in the affairs of Severine (Simone Simon), an unhappy young wife to stationmaster Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux). Severine has a tangled past of her own, and when Roubaud discovers it he enters a murderous rage, killing Severine’s godfather on a moving train. Lantier was on that same train car when the murder took place, and saw Severine exit the cabin at the time of the crime. Entranced by her wounded catlike beauty, he lies to the police and hides her secret. He falls in love with her, and she with him, though both are drawn to self-destructive acts. Severine becomes convinced that the only way out of her predicament is for Lantier to kill Roubaud, and then they can escape together…somewhere. But murder only begets murder, and Severine and Lantier set loose their demons on each other until the only escape is death.

Lantier is a devilishly difficult character to portray, a victim of fate and genetics who still, in the end, commits heinous acts. He is something of a monster, and yet Gabin’s sensitive, wounded, and defeated performance imbues him with what amounts to a soul. He shows a man who fought against and instincts and lost, now playing out the string until he does himself in for good. He is soft-spoken, almost mumbly, his words receding as soon as he says them. It is a proto-Brando performance, and turns makes Lantier a sympathetic monster instead of a pathetic one. Simone Simon has less to work with, her character is more of a means to an unfortunate end -but exudes a wounded, capricious spirit.

In a film of great performances, one sequence stands out. It is Renoir himself playing the character of Cabuche, drifter and former childhood friend of Severine. He is the one unjustly fingered for the murder on the train, for some uncouth comments he made afterward. He is brought in for questioning, and this rather brusque fellow, who killed a man in prison, launches into a nostalgic reverie about picking strawberries in the summer, looking for chestnuts in the fall, walking through the forest hand in hand with this girl who was nice to him when he was otherwise shunned. His soot-covered face softens, his head bowed with the weight of his memories. It is one of those diversionary Renoir moments when the entire life of a minor character blooms forth, overspilling with love and admiration. It is this kind of love that Lantier and Severine don’t seem to be capable of, weighed down as they are by their mutual maladies and disgust with the lives they have been given. Oftentimes I would wish the film would wander off more like that Cabuche monologue, pull itself free of the ever-constricting doom enveloping Lantier and Severine. But those two star-crossed lovers free themselves in their own way, the only way they know how.

This is the eighth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. The previous entries:

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

A Day in the Country (1936)

The Lower Depths (1936)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

Jean Renoir: A Day in the Country (1936)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney9 Comments

May 23, 2017

One of Jean Renoir’s most beloved films is one he wasn’t interested in finishing. While making A Day in the Country, Renoir was in pre-production on both The Lower Depths (1936) and Grand Illusion (1937). Once A Day in the Country ran into money problems he put it to the side, leaving it to be finished by his producer Pierre Braunberger. Shot in 1936, it wasn’t released until 1946 as a 40-minute short, whereupon it swiftly entered the pantheon. A suggestive slip of a movie, adapted from a Maupassant short story, it portrays the dueling desires of a bourgeois Parisian family and two country layabouts out for a bit of flirtatious sport. What transpires is beyond their respective imaginings, a transformative lust that lingers well beyond that afternoon under the summer sun.

Jean Renoir was eager to work again with Sylvia Bataille, who he had just directed in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936). So he pitched her a number of ideas for their next collaboration. Bataille recalled, as quoted in Pascal Merigeau’s Jean Renoir: A Biography, “We’d thought about two or three screenplays before we hit upon the idea of A Day in the Country. The others were original ideas from Renoir. Then he reread Maupassant, had me read it, we talked about it, and we made the film. I liked it a lot more than the screenplays he’d offered me before.” A reluctant performer, Merigeau describes her as “extremely cultured and very exacting,” and was the driving creative force on the other side of the camera. She was separated from her husband Georges Bataille, though they remained friendly, and Bataille made a cameo in A Day in the Country as a priest alongside photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. She would later marry the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who is much abused in film theory classes to this day. It was, as usual for Renoir, a familial set, and was shot in Marlotte, the town Renoir had made his home for the previous fifteen years.

Renoir adapted the Maupassant tale himself, which concerns the arrival of a Parisian family to Marlotte for a weekend getaway. They are led by the blustering shop owner Monsieur Dufour (Andre Gabriello), huffing and puffing with necktie always askew. He brings his chirping wife Madame Dufour (Jane Marken), his lissome daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille), and his bumbling shop assistant Anatole (Paul Temps), who is being groomed to win Henriette’s hand in marriage. When they arrive at the local seafood restaurant, operated by the blustering Poulain (Renoir), they are spotted by a couple of bored lotharios, who accept both Madame Dufour and Henriette as fetching challenges. The aggressively mustachioed Rodolphe (Jacques B. Brunius) targets Henriette, while the lower key Henri agrees to flirt with Madame. But the paths of lust get twisted, and one of the riverside trysts haunts its lovers for the remainder of their years.

I had always assumed that it was intended as a feature, but survived as this fragmentary piece. But Merigeau writes it was always intended to be short of feature length. “The contract assigning the rights to the story, signed on May 15, 1936, with Editions Albin Michel on behalf of Simone de Maupassant, specified ‘a prefeature opener film no longer than 800 meters [about 29 minutes].’” They were to pay an additional fee if they went over 1,000 meters (32 minutes). Merigeau estimates that Renoir’s final script would have run 56 minutes if it had been completed – the version that exists runs a svelte 41 minutes.

The film begins with an unusual text introduction, indicating the fragmentary nature of the finished product:

Due to circumstances beyond his control, Jean Renoir was unable to finish this film. As he is currently in America, we chose to present it without modification, to respect his work and style. Two title cards were added to aid comprehension.

Shooting was slated to begin on June 27, but rains kept delaying them and racking up expenses. They ended production on July 18th, with Braunberger out of money and needing to time to find more. He secured short-term financing by August 6th, but the next day Renoir left for Paris to start casting on The Lower Depths. He left instructions for his crew (which included costume designer/prop master Luchino Visconti), but Merigeau estimates 23 shots were made without Renoir present (they were likely directed by his assistant Jacques Becker). Bataille was furious at Renoir abandoning the film, reportedly yelling at him, “You’re really despicable, a coward!” Renoir responded, “Fine, then, you won’t be appearing in The Lower Depths.” And he kept his word.

It is remarkable that in spite of this off-screen upheaval, A Day in the Country is a such a lucid, beautifully performed movie. Renoir has great fun with the Dufour family’s foibles – the bickering antics between the lumbering Monsieur and the whippet sized Anatole are comparable to Laurel and Hardy (as noted by my mother, who watched it with me last night). Rodolphe is another charming comic creation, who is introduced taking off his handlebar moustache holder (a hair net for his ‘stache), and leering exaggeratedly at Henriette out the window. Later he does a prancing faun dance around Madame Dufour, for him love is a show that he’ll perform for any audience. Henri is the reluctant player in the game, the glum romantic who Rodolphe chides for his serial monogamy. Henriette is attracted to his silence, as compared to Rodolphe’s theatrical fakery. Henriette is introduced as the poetic one in her family, talking dreamily about our connection to nature, the humanity of the bugs in the ground. In Henri’s silence she hears a kindred soul.

Their meeting is brief but fateful, and Renoir handles their encounter in shorthand, punctuated by one of the great close-ups in cinema. It closes in on Henriette and is an image of overwhelming exhaustion. Henri is not who she thought he was. Henriette is not who he thought she was. And so they are left together with a memory they will keep close to their hearts and never tell another soul.

This is the fifth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. The previous entries:

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Nana (1926)

La Chienne (1931)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

The Tramp: Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932)

February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney10 Comments

May 16, 2017

“From Boudu I have learned that one of the attitudes to take toward society is to loathe it.” – Michel Simon

In Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) Michel Simon plays a bearded bum who has lost interest in humanity. Boudu would prefer to stroll in the park with his dog or drown at the bottom of the Seine than re-enter the world of neckties and table manners and responsibility. But he is dragged into it by a bourgeois bookseller who hopes to “save” him from his “plight.” But instead of praise Boudu brings chaos, destabilizing the household from within. Simon closely collaborated with director Jean Renoir on the production, and it is a tour de force performance, with Simon a loose-limbed satyr, extending his gangly frame in all the wrong directions so as to most annoy his hosts. It is something of a thematic sequel to La Chienne (1931), which Renoir and Simon completed the previous year and which I wrote about last week. They both center Simon as a sympathetic monster, one who commits despicable acts but only because they are being true to themselves. It is Boudu’s nature to drift, so if he is not allowed to drown in the undercurrent, he will coast above it, roiling all the lives he touches along the way.

Boudu Saved From Drowning was the first production for Les Productions Michel Simon, which the actor created in January of 1932, having hopes of many collaborations with Renoir. At the time the director said, as quoted in Pascal Merigeau’s Jean Renoir: A Biography: “We have a superb understanding of each other; he hates the outrageous complications of the world of film as much as I do…and we really want to remain independent. We have the capital, the screenplays, and we know what we want. You know what a wonderful comic actor Simon is; so we’re going to make a comedy every year.” It turned out that Boudu was the first and last film for the company.

The film was based on a play by René Fauchois that debuted in 1919, though Simon had performed as Boudu in the 1925 revival. Renoir deviated wildly from the original, retaining only the first two acts, and, as Merigeau reports, adding a prologue and epilogue. Fauchois was so enraged by Renoir’s changes that he rushed a new stage version of the play, with an added fourth act, that premiered while the film was still in theaters. The biggest difference in the productions is the fate of Boudu. Fauchois’s original has him successfully saved by the bookseller, married to his maid and a new member of the middle class. Renoir’s Boudu rejects this life, opting for a radical, disruptive freedom.

As with La Chienne, Boudu opens with theatrical artifice – that of a satyr and nymph playacting in front of a drop cloth. He pursues and she resists, until he pulls her in for a kiss, the camera pulls back, and there is a dissolve to the spiral staircase of the Lestringuez residence. There is a pan left to the window, where round bookshop owner Edouard (Charles Granval) is trilling sweet nothings and pawing at his mistress (and maid) Chloë (Sévérine Lerczinska) before his wife Emma (Marcelle Hainia) sarcastically enters. The household is now associated with stagecraft and fakery, while Boudu is introduced in nature, lazing under a tree while his dog plays in a pond (water imagery surrounds Boudu throughout). When his dog wanders off, Boudu disconsolately goes out on a search. But no one is willing to help a bum, as cops and civilians run away at the sight of him. He wanders the background of shots as a rich lady gets the attention of the whole park with a story of her missing pekingese. Experimenting with deep focus, Renoir and his DP Georges Asselin often isolate Boudu in the distance, a tiny figure hiding behind trees or propping himself up in a door frame. The closer to the front of the frame he is, the more trouble he causes. It is technically brilliant but registers casually, offhand. André Bazin wrote that, “One of the most paradoxically appealing aspects of Jean Renoir’s work is that everything in it is so casual. He is the only film maker in the world who can afford to treat the cinema with such apparent offhandedness. … If one had to describe the art of Renoir in a word, one could define it as an aesthetic of discrepancy.”

Still hurting from the loss of a dog, or for other reasons never stated, Boudu wanders to a bridge and jumps off. Across the street Edouard is watching ladies with his telescope and witnesses the suicide attempt. Shocked into action, he rushes to the scene and dives to rescue Boudu from the water. Edouard becomes something of a local hero, Boudu’s rescue representative of the right mindedness of the bourgeoisie. But Boudu had no interest in being rescued – he’d either die or float downriver, and either outcome would be OK with him. Instead he’s stuck at the Lestringuez home as a charity case, a way for the family to feel good about themselves, and justify the morality of the middle class. He is a totem of their sensitivity.

In return Boudu proves his unsuitability for civilized life, spreading shoe polish over the bed linens, flooding the kitchen, and in the ultimate outrage, spitting in a volume of Balzac. Boudu is a monster and a man of principle. He doesn’t grow or change or learn a thing over the course of the film’s running time, but remains irrepressibly himself, destroying property and blithely telling uncomfortable truths. He also seduces Chl0ë AND Emma, but the artistically minded Edouard doesn’t mind that intrusion too much, he seems to take it as a compliment. And sex, which has become business to Chloë and infrequent for Emma, becomes a source of pleasure again for both of them. In fact the Lestringuez family is not wrecked by Boudu’s depredations, but awakened by them. Boudu trashing their place makes them drop their artificial posing and look at each other truthfully, at least for a little while.

Boudu returns to nature, first flinging off his fitted suit and putting on the tattered clothes of a scarecrow, and then flinging his fedora into the Marne River. Then the camera detaches itself from Boudu’s POV, a privileged moment of documentary. The last we see him, Boudu lies back in the grass and looks at the sky. But the camera pans and follows the trajectory of his hat, floating down the river. We see the activity of the waterway, rowers practicing, the current flowing and the particular haze surrounding a blade of grass. Bazin puts it better than I can:

“What moves us is not the fact that this countryside is once again Boudu’s domain, but that the banks of the Marne, in all the richness of their detail, are intrinsically beautiful. At the end of the pan, the camera picks up a bit of grass where, in close-up, one can see distinctly the white dust that the heat and the wind have lifted from the path. One can almost feel it between one’s fingers. Boudu is going to stir it up with his foot. If I were deprived of the pleasure of seeing Boudu again for the rest of my days, I would never forget that grass, that dust, and their relationship to the liberty of a tramp.”

This is the fourth part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. The first entry on Whirlpool of Fate (1925) is here. The second entry on Nana (1926) is here. The third entry on La Chienne (1931) is here.

Life is Beautiful: La Chienne (1931)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney12 Comments

May 9, 2017

The characters in La Chienne (1931) do not learn or grow, but remain indelibly themselves. Each act of pettiness, adultery or murder is a logical extension of personality, fated in DNA. It is the earliest of director Jean Renoir’s canonical works, bitterly funny and desperately sad, which unravels a love triangle in which all three members cling to unsustainable illusions. A mild-mannered cashier (Michel Simon) and brutish pimp (Georges Flamant) both project their dreams of escape onto a no-nonsense prostitute (Janie Marèse), who is unwilling to satisfy their divergent desires (the cashier asks for love, the pimp money – neither ask what she wants). None are capable of enough empathy to consider the other’s position, so they continue in mutual incomprehension, and on to frustration and violence. Renoir bookends the film with a puppet show, framing the trio as marionettes not in control of their destiny, tugged along by their natures. While this leads them to tragedy, it also provides them with a radical kind of freedom, the sloughing off of all control.

This is the third part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. The first entry on The Whirlpool of Fate is here. The second entry on Nana is here.

According to Renoir, he was only allowed to make La Chienne, his second sound film, after he could prove that he could work quickly and under budget. So he was assigned to adapt the Georges Feydeau comedy On purge bébé (1931), which he wrote, directed and edited in three weeks. His producers Pierre Braunberger and Roger Richebé formed the production company Les Etablissements Braunberger-Roger Richebé in 1930. Braunberger was a longtime friend who had worked with Renoir since Whirlpool of Fate in 1925. It was reportedly Richebé who asked Renoir to use On purge bébé as a test for La Chienne, though Renoir biographer Pascal Merigeau could not find anything to support Renoir and Branuberger’s claims to that effect. In any case On purge bébé was made very quickly, but though Renoir dismisses it as a commercial job, it is really quite funny, especially if you are interested in Michel Simon reaction shots after he accidentally swallows some laxatives. And it is here he begins his collaboration with sound engineer Joseph de Bretagne, which continued through The Golden Coach in 1952. Renoir was insistent in recording sound live instead of in post, and On purge bébé was infamous for its toilet flushing sound. Renoir wrote: “In my concern for realism, I used the flush of a real toilet in the studio. The result produced the sound of a cataract that thrilled the production representatives and elevated me to the level of a great man.”

Les Etablissements Braunberger-Roger Richebé announced that they acquired the rights to Georges de La Fouchardiere’s La Chienne on April 11, 1931. Renoir adapted the script himself and directed the film. There is some question as to whether the film was reedited by the producers, but Renoir claimed he got the cut he wanted, and Merigeau concluded that it “was probably edited by Renoir and Marguerite [Renoir], then by Denis Batcheff under the direction of Paul Fejos.” The film concerns Maurice Legrand (Simon), a passive weak-chinned cashier at a women’s hosiery factory who paints as a hobby. A masterfully fastidious performance by Simon, his Maurice is little more than a recessive nasal murmur, a man who speaks not to be heard but to get quicker into silences. He is married to Adèle (Madeleine Berubet), a demanding shrew who is endlessly comparing Maurice to her first husband, who died in WWI. Coming home from an office party, Maurice stumbles into a spat between Lulu (Marèse) and her pimp Dédé (Flamant). (In a tragic footnote, soon after filming Marèse would die in a crash, in a car that Flamant was driving.) Thinking that he is being gallant, he knocks Dédé over and escorts Lulu home. To seem more interesting, Maurice tells Lulu that he is a painter. Dédé encourages Lulu to cultivate that relationship and leech him of money, thinking he is a famous artist in America. Needing some quick cash, Dédé steals a couple of unsigned canvases and invents an artist to assign it to: “Clara Wood.” Clara Wood becomes an in-demand artist, and Lulu takes on the role. Maurice is flattered that his art is getting attention, and pleased it’s generating income for Lulu. Temporarily, all parties get their ego stroked. But then Maurice miraculously is freed of his marital bonds, and sheepishly asks Lulu to marry him. She can playact no longer, and laughs in his face. It is the end of their “selfless” performances, and the reveal of their truest selves.

The Guignol puppet at the beginning of the film declares, “The play we shall perform is neither drama nor comedy. It contains no moral message, and has nothing to prove. The characters are neither heroes nor villains. They’re plain folk like you or me,” implicating the viewer in the tonal shifts to come, for the film is focalized through Maurice, a typically sympathetic lead character. But as the film progresses he reveals depths of insecurity beyond even Dédé, a man who slaps Lulu around out of boredom. But the wonder of the film is that it never sits in judgment; even the most heinous actions occur due to the convergence of personality and circumstance, and Renoir’s camera keeps its distance, peeking through curtains or café windows. This framing is remote, almost aloof. As Bazin wrote, “There is a deliberate attempt here to use a frame within the frame to underline the importance of all that lies beyond the screen.” As this petty drama unfolds, there are others behind and at all sides of the camera, just out of view.

The last few sequences evade language, and invite cliché. They take place years later, with Maurice reduced to vagrancy and homelessness, and yet still capable of his pinched smile. He wishes for his own death and yet opines that “life is beautiful” as one of his old “Clara Wood” canvases is sold to a wealthy buyer. The ending is brutally ironic and entirely sincere. Maurice has erased himself from society while his work is sold under an imaginary name. But he gets a tip for opening a car door, enough to buy a hot meal, and that, at least temporarily, is a beautiful thing.