Emile Zola – R. Emmet Sweeney

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)

May 2, 2017

Jean Renoir considered Nana (1926) to be “my first film worth talking about.” An ambitious adaptation of the Emile Zola novel, Nana (Catherine Hessling) is an actress of limited means adept at manipulating men’s hearts, failing as a stage star but lavishly succeeding as an actor in her own life (a theme Renoir would return to throughout his career). After his scrappy independent production The Whirlpool of Fate (1925) failed to get much distribution, Renoir went big, making Nana a million franc French-German co-production. It is an enormous step up in scale, going from shooting around his childhood haunts in Whirlpool to juggling multiple locations around Europe, as well as the egos of his international cast. Still experimenting stylistically, Nana, like Whirlpool, has expressionist touches at the edges of a realist drama. This tension is centered in the performance of Hessling (Renoir’s wife, real name Andrée Heuschling). A devotee of Gloria Swanson, she is elaborately made up and gives a performance of grand gestures and herky jerky movement. Renoir admiringly compared her to a “marionette.” It works for the character – a woman not in charge of her own life – but for audiences used to more naturalistic acting, it faced ridicule. But Nana is no joke, but a bold experiment in which Renoir toys with performance and camera movement to convey the unsaid.

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

According to Pascal Merigeau’s Jean Renoir: A Biography, the production company Films Renoir was incorporated on September 1, 1925. The previous month Nana had been announced. Renoir was still negotiating with the Emile Zola estate, but eventually paid them 75,000 francs for the rights to the story. In order to secure German funding, they needed to cast German actors. Through the help of producer Pierre Braunberger, the role of Count Muffat, Nana’s main suitor, went to Werner Krauss, known today as Doctor Caligari in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). They also cast the German actress Valeska Gert (The Joyless Street, 1925) as Nana’s maid, Zoe. This helped convince Delog Film Kommanditgesellschaft, Jacobi & Co. to pay for the costs of the German shoot, since there would be a built-in local audience. It didn’t pan out that way, but it allowed for the film to continue.

Gert would later describe Hessling as “an authentic Parisian, chic, capricious [who] used a outrageous amount of makeup, which, at the time, only Gloria Swanson was doing.” Hessling was an untaught talent, and had no intention of taking lessons, unless the Americans called. She told her friend Alice Fighiera that if they called, “it will mean I’ve got talent. If they don’t, none of it’s worth the trouble.” She is introduced rising above the stage on a winch, in one of the first dolly shots of the film. Renoir and his DPs Jean Bachelet and Edmund Corwin use the technique as a slow reveal, a setup and punchline. Catherine is raised but cannot descend all the way to the stage, a knot keeps her dangling frustratingly above solid ground. Her flailing struggles make her look like a puppet. After the show a few suitors are shown waiting at her dressing room. The camera slowly dollies backward to reveal that the whole floor and staircase is clogged with potential paramours.

Only one manages to shoulder his way inside her room, the wealthy Count Muffat, who has enough cash to underwrite Nana’s career at the struggling theater. A blooming fetishist, Muffat becomes aroused by the hair stuck in her comb, and is at her beck and call the rest of the feature – by the end she has him on all fours barking like a dog. Like Charles Foster Kane, he funds her dramatic work, only for her to be laughed off the stage. Nana is completely without self-criticism, she truly believed her flouncy over-affected caricature could fly as a portrait of an upper class lady. When her life as an artist flops, she begins her second, more lucrative, life as a courtesan, with a group of lapdogs on her string. The other most notable victim is Vandeuvres (Jean Angelo), the last remaining scion of a distinguished family. He sullies his name in a poorly thought out racetrack swindle; to win Nana’s heart is through her pocketbook, or so he believes.

But there is no way to Nana’s heart, for even she doesn’t know the directions. Hessling plays her with an armor of artifice, always playacting to the room. One never knows what is authentic emotion or simply a flirtatious technique. Emblematic of her capriciousness is a shot where Nana wields a pool cue, lines it up against a fine piece of china as if setting up a shot, and then smashes it. Renoir would write in My Life and My Films that “In Nana she carried it [stylization] to the uttermost extreme. She was not a woman at all, but a marionette. The word, as I use it, is a complement.” This doll crushes every man like that fine china, not that they don’t deserve it. Muffat is a dour married man who blows up his marriage out of boredom and a hair fetish. Vandeuvres is another of the idle death-wish rich, using Nana as an excuse for self-incineration. The only cad worthy of pity is a callow youth named Georges (Raymond Guérin Catelain), whose love seems innocent and true, and his delicate constitution can’t handle seeing Nana play pseudo S&M games with the masochistic Muffat.

Nana is surprised by her own emotions at the loss of two of her suitors, both of whom take their own lives. During an extraordinary sequence at a Parisian ball, Nana tries to recapture her previous decadence, losing herself in a feverish can-can, an attempt to sweat out her emotions. But she cannot stop them. Renoir ends the film with some of his most complicated and basic techniques. There are double exposures revealing ghosts of lovers past, haunting her with their modes of demise. Her body, unused to such feeling, shuts down. And without depicting a dramatic collapse, or giving her one last command performance, Renoir simply turns out the lights.

Tag: Emile Zola

Jean Renoir: La Bete Humaine (1938)

Party Girl: Nana (1926)