French Cancan

1955, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir reunites with Gabin after a fifteen-year gap, with the actor in a classic later-period Gabin role, roguish yet charming, and almost startling in the rich colours that Renoir employs. Though French in its frame of reference -- the songs, the locations -- there's an echo of classic Hollywood putting-on-a-show spectaculars, albeit with an air of melancholy that's entirely specific to Renoir's film (the wonderful scene where Gabin relaxes backstage, satisfied that things have come together but fully aware the public has no need to see him).

Chotard et compagnie

1933, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Despite the substantial corpus of writing devoted to Renoir, there are few words on this particular film, a surprise as I found it generally charming and technically quite compelling. It occasionally reminded me of Die Koffer des Herrn O.F., especially in the second half, as an entire town buys into a particular obsession (complete with dream sequences). It was really the opening that grabbed me, though, with the first shot part of a long lineage of bravura openers, and the film is mostly made on a set that permits a great deal of easy movement, the camera peering behind corners, through windows, and generally keeping an eye on characters as they move around the space. 

Chotard himself is played by Fernand Charpin, such a key presence in Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy, and he's a delight here, too. The plot is driven by the marriage of Chotard's daughter to an unpromising fellow, a writer played by Georges Pomiès, a name wholly unfamiliar to me, but from his movement it wasn't hard to figure out that he was trained as a dancer, and indeed that this was his primary vocation. He's not a great choice for the part but his background certainly adds an interesting energy to the character, granting him an unexpected and graceful physical presence. As a casting selection, it reminded me a little of the offbeat energy of Jean-Louis Barrault in Drôle de drame, though that's a more successful marriage. Which in turn reminds that I took a reflexive dislike to Pomiès when I discovered that he had won Louis Jouvet's lover Lisa Duncan away from the great actor (though of course she may have been the one who effected the change). 

While the whole thing is based on a pre-existing play, I couldn't help but wonder if there was a reference to Simenon -- with whom Renoir remained friendly after the director adapted one of the Maigret novels -- when the characters discuss an industrial-scale production of literature, of a kind that Simenon himself would have had no trouble keeping up with given his book-a-month rhythm. 

On purge bébé

1931, France, directed by Jean Renoir

A film that Renoir by all accounts made to show his ability to film with sound on a budget, in order to impress potential producers. Obviously, though, he was already an experienced filmmaker and despite the film's pretty straightforward nature he clearly spent at least some time working on direct sound, use of diegetic music, and, from time to time, on the framing of actors' faces, although some of the film is shot in a theatrical format that underlines the picture's stage origins. The most interesting points, for me, were on the casting level -- an exceptionally early, blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance from Fernandel, and, far more substantial, an amusing turn from Michel Simon, already cast in roles far beyond his years.

Toni

1935, France, directed by Jean Renoir

A very interesting on-location picture, clearly made under the influence of Pagnol in terms of the southern realism on display (Pagnol's company was involved with the film, but as distributor rather than producer). There's little optimism here in this deliberately circular tale -- the contrast between the larkish beginning and the pessimism of the conclusion is very stark, and in many ways the film has a modernity that Renoir may not have intended, at least with respect to the pointed commentary on immigration, something that's hard to push out of the mind in early 2016. If Pagnol himself had made this I'd expect it to be leavened with a little more comic relief, or even perhaps the more gentle acceptance of the vagaries of humanity that you find in much of Renoir's best work. I'm not all that familiar with Charles Blavette, who plays Toni, though he did appear in Pagnol's La Femme du boulanger among others; more recognizable to me was Andrex, whose apparently permanent cheeriness is used to good subversive effect in the conclusion.

La Nuit du carrefour

1932, France, directed by Jean Renoir

The very first Maigret adaptation -- there was another the same year, and just one more during the 1930s -- and one of the strangest, with an almost abstract air at times, as well as a curious tendency to linger carefully over objects as much as on people. Although Maigret is as physically imposing a presence as on the page I still had the sense that he's operating here in a kind of existential haze, although this also captures the detective's ability to peer deep into the soul rather well. The film was made largely on location, in the kind of grim suburban setting so beloved of Simenon (that suburban setting was virtually a character in the novel of Monsieur Hire, for instance), and for the most part things are mud- and rain-soaked (foreshadowing, perhaps, the even muddier Une si jolie petite plage). 

Le Caporal épinglé

1962, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Though it shares affinities with Renoir's own earlier La Grande illusion -- the survival of fellow-feeling in the midst of war, most obviously -- this late entry in the director's filmography feels more in the spirit of other popular hits of the period dealing with the wartime experience, most obviously Henri Verneuil's 1959 La Vache et le prisonnier, one of Fernandel's major successes, and even Gérard Oury's subsequent blockbuster La Grande vadrouille, with Louis de Funès and Bourvil. All three films move, with varying success, between comic and serious registers, as seems to befit the shared wartime setting, though Renoir, as one might expect, manages the transitions pretty seamlessly, particularly in a suspenseful section where prisoners listen for news of an escape. The terrific group of then-largely-unknown actors like Claude Rich, Claude Brasseur and Jean-Pierre Cassel combine to create a wonderful series of portraits of Frenchmen from across the spectrum thrown together by the circumstances of war. The comic Guy Bedos is also amusing in a small role, the opposite of his logorrheic stand-up persona, while Jean Carmet provides a little more experience in one of the most broadly comic roles, a farmer obsessed by the care of his cows, perhaps an explicit nod to Fernandel's character mentioned above.

La Règle du jeu

1939, France, directed by Jean Renoir

I've little to add to the enormous amount written about Renoir's film, surely one of the most dissected in all of cinema, except to note, once again, the wonderfully loose feel -- it feels as spontaneous, despite its perfection, as the vaudeville-esque stage show that takes place during the second half of the film. What astonishes me time and again (though it has been too long since my last viewing) is the delicacy of touch, the way in which farce can share a stage with high drama, or melodrama, and violence, without the juxtapositions ever seeming awkward. As the film approaches its climax, one set of players cavorts through the sets in a manner reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, or perhaps the Keystone Gamekeepers, sharing space with others attempting to resolve romances that span the spectrum from fleeting to lifelong. It's hard to resists framing any reading of the film against the backdrop of 1939 -- as catastrophe looms, Renoir seems to suggest that many are oblivious, dancing and playing on as blithely as those aboard the Titanic as the iceberg loomed, except that while those on board ship had no way to predict what was ahead France's citizenry in 1939 had no such excuse.

I last saw the film on the big screen, and my abiding visual memory of that viewing was the depth of many of Renoir's compositions, characters strategically placed into the far distance, whereas this time, on the smaller screen, I was struck most by the two shots, particularly those involving the character of Octave, played by Renoir himself -- two faces almost completely fill the screen at times, abstracted from the overall setting. I'd never noticed before how Octave, spilling great torrents of verbiage, might be seen as a precursor to later, comic, characters in the French pantheon, particularly someone like Coluche: for all the latter performer's different social standing, there's a similarity in the ways which both Renoir and Coluche employ words as a kind of battering ram while also making canny use of their size for both comic and serious effect.

La Marseillaise

1938, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir's film begins in the same spirit as Ken Loach's much later pair of historical features, Land and Freedom or The Wind that Shakes the Barley, as an attempt to dramatize some sense of the actual lived experience of a major historical event, in this case the French Revolution. The intention is ostensibly democratic, bringing us both to Louis XVI's bedside in Versailles and the lower levels of revolt in the south of France, though there's never a moment of doubt as to where the film's sympathies lie (and perhaps there's a little cheating in the decision to halt proceedings well before the Revolution's bloody excesses begin, when sympathies become much more complex).

As the film progresses, and particularly after our introduction to the titular song (then an unknown air that was to grow in popularity), the film becomes much more didactic, with rather obvious conversations about the meaning of France's new sense of citizenship that are clearly more in the spirit of 1938, in the shadow of fascism, rather than explorations of the meaning and reality of 1789 and beyond. Of course, the notion of participatory citizenship is key to the French social ideal, so the debates between the newly-anointed citizens function in two different time periods, but they are occasionally rather heavy-handed, a matter not helped by the fact that the two main actors are not the weightiest of performers.

Andrex, most often seen at the side of his pal Fernandel, isn't able to do much with some of the stodgier lines, while Edmond Ardisson, making his debut here, occasionally seems to be acting in an entirely different movie, perhaps a broad comedy -- his goofy expressions appear to have been shipped in from a Revolution-era spoof, while his fey manner, perhaps unremarkable in 1938, tends to undermine his romantic exploits (see the first image!). Many of the supporting players are rather stronger, including Renoir's older brother Pierre as Louis XVI (particularly in a terrific moment, late on, when the king suddenly understands how his world is about to change), or Louis Jouvet in a small role as the government representative Roederer, tasked with persuading the king to appear before the parliament.

Les Bas-fonds

1936, France, directed by Jean Renoir

I'm slowly watching my way through Louis Jouvet's filmography, and Renoir's film is the first I've seen that really gives extended rein to Jouvet as a film performer rather than as an actor replaying stage material; I haven't see his performance in Robert Siodmak's Mister Flow, which appears to have been filmed earlier the same year, though it sounds as though it was something of a troubled production [I've since plugged that particular gap]. Here, he's paired with Jean Gabin, who plays more or less the same -- immensely charming -- character from films like the same year's La Belle équipe.

It's an apposite match: despite their differing acting styles, both Gabin and Jouvet were originally men of the stage, albeit the music hall stage in Gabin's case, and there's a joyous complicity to their work together. Both, too, were fairly careful in their choice of work: so many French actors of the period seemed to say yes to every role that came their way it makes Gabin and Jouvet seem cautious by comparison, though each probably had the occasional regret. Their scenes together crackle: they're first brought together in a scene of attempted robbery that foreshadows Blier's Tenue de soirée, in which the putative victims try to get in on the action.

Renoir underlines their complicity with a pair of mirror-image scenes, the first in which Jouvet stands impassively while on the receiving end of a lengthy brush-off by an unseen official, the second with Gabin talking up a storm to a silent police commissioner, again unseen until the soliloquy concludes. The difference between the scenes is key to the characters: Jouvet's Baron ultimately accepts his fall from aristocratic grace, serenely acknowledging an inner truth about himself, while Gabin's hard-scrabble Pepel is always on the make, trying to leave an unwanted life in the lower depths behind. He's almost jealous of his unlikely friend's inner peace, though they do share one treasurable sequence of riverside idyll, where life slows down and the sun and the peacefully flowing Marne come to the fore, washing other cares away for an hour or two.

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier

1959, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Made for French television - though it also had a brief cinema release - Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier is Renoir's contemporary Parisian take on Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Jean-Louis Barrault in the dual role of Cordelier and his "experiment", Opale. The film comes complete with an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" prologue, wherein the great director arrives at the television station and settles in before introducing his bizarre tale.

In that prologue, Renoir plays with perspectives, using television monitors to frame his monologue within larger frames, then cutting to a closer shot of his face. Later, once we enter the world of Cordelier and his creation, much of the action is shot in a manner reminiscent of the stage, with the characters carefully placed across the set, but as if to prevent the action from seeming excessively stage-bound, characters occasionally emerge from "behind" the camera.

Barrault, the great stage artist best known for his role as a mime in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis, plays his two roles with a minimum of special effects artifice. Cordelier is a pretty conventional doctor type - his research base recalls that of the doctor in George Franju's extraordinary film Les Yeux sans visage, made the same year - but Opale is a strange creature indeed. Though the character is prone to a bit of the old ultra-violence, and attacks a child in an early sequence, he moves almost like a dancer, and often recalls the physical comedy of performers like Chaplin. It's an unexpected interpretation that keeps the viewer constantly off-balance, never quite sure how to judge Opale, a creature born against his will from another's ill-judged experiments.

La Vie est à nous

1936, France, produced/coordinated by Jean Renoir

Although he did direct a number of sequences in the film, Renoir himself rejected sole directorial credit for La Vie est à nous, a 1936 election campaign film for the French Communist party (the party almost quadrupled its previous total of deputies, and took power as part of the Popular Front government, which lasted one year). The film never received the censor's approval, and hence was restricted to private showings organized by the party itself. There's little of Renoir's usual directorial presence here, with the film often devolving into pure propaganda, of a kind that now makes many (including former adherents to the movement) distinctly comfortable - perhaps especially the brief segments lauding Stalin.

About an hour long, the film is divided into two segments, the first an essay-like statement of conditions in France and her neighbors, melding lectures, documentary footage and manipulations (such as the amusing, and yet chilling, sequences in which Hitler and Mussolini bark like dogs); it's a fragmented collage that likely influenced Godard's most openly political films, as well as later filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Teno, adept at assembling collages from many sources (notably, though, there's barely the slightest reference to France's overseas empire, on which so much of the country's economic success depended). The second half of the film narrates three episodes where the party is seen to be a force for good; while the anecdotes undoubtedly had parallels in reality, the manner in which the party is seen to provide material and spiritual succour can perhaps be indulged as characteristic of the spirit of the times, but ultimately has little of the power of more subtle, fictional Popular Front films such as Renoir's own Le Crime de Monsieur Lange or Julien Duvivier's (now) little-seen La Belle équipe.

La Chienne

1931, France, directed by Jean Renoir


Although both of his silent features give fascinating glimpses of his developing artistry and technical skill (as well as his willingness to experiment), Renoir's first feature-length sound film immediately reveals the breadth of his skill. Here he's recognizably the director who would produce a string of masterpieces over an extraordinarily productive decade (over a dozen feature-length films and several important shorter works during the 1930s). Renoir embraces the possibilities created by the coming of sound, giving Michel Simon one of his strongest roles, with some wonderfully savoury dialogue, while playing with filmed space in strikingly new ways. Simon is more buttoned-down here than in some of his iconic performances from later in the decade (including in Renoir's own Boudu sauvé des eaux the following year), and while it takes some adjustment to see this force of nature as a modest hen-pecked clerk, it's an intelligent bit of casting, with Simon adept at concealing unforeseen motives, and later giving them full expression.

The other actors can't hope to compete with Simon, and the young pair of George Flamant and Janie Marèse (the latter was killed in a road accident before the film's release) display their inexperience; Flamant, in particular, has a theatricality at odds with the naturalism of the rest of the cast (he might have found himself more at home in Renoir's silent films), though he does at times capture a repulsive thuggishness reminiscent of a grapefruit-shoving James Cagney. His character, Dédé, displays a contempt for women that is underlined in other discomfiting ways by the film: Simon's wife is an extraordinarily shrewish woman from the moment we encounter her, with the men in her life competing with one another to divest themselves of their attachment (the film's main weakness is its inability to account for these attachments in the first place); the competition does, though, give the film a welcome jolt just as the pace seems to flag a little.

As the film reaches its climax, Renoir pays explicit homage to René Clair's Sous les toits de Paris, his camera rising and falling from street to rooftop and back again, unveiling a scene of tragedy that also reveals, in parallel, the worst of Dédé's arrogance; it's a sequence that is both technically perfect and deeply human, celebrating the life of Paris's streets while remaining blunt about the sometimes ugly stories concealed behind closed doors.

Nana

1926, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir's second solo feature is a large-scale literary adaptation, an attempt to condense Emile Zola's eponymous novel - part of his multi-volume Rougon-Macquart epic - to manageable length. At times, the film slips explicitly into literary mode, with many, and sometimes lengthy, title cards to clarify the action (there is a certain amount of redundancy, with some cards repeating information that can clearly be deduced even in the absence of dialogue). Despite that occasional clumsiness, Renoir generally seems confident working on this expanded scale, even if the film occasionally misses the naturalistic settings of his previous La Fille de l'eau, confined as it is to sets that don't quite capture the heart of Zola's realist project (there are, though, several compositions which recall something of the earthiness of Flemish and Dutch art).

He uses his increased budget especially well in the theatrical scenes, creating a memorable portrait of the different social classes on one of the rare occasions when they occupy the same space - with the raucous upper decks contrasted with the genteel though hypocritical upper classes in the box seats. There are also a number of scenes shot in the stunning entrance way to a grand residence, including one particularly moving sequence where two of the men bewitched by Nana (Catherine Hessling) mend fences as they attempt to disentangle themselves from foolish liaisons. Those men are complicit in their own debasement, however, allowing Nana - a theatre actress and child of the streets, whose manager is as much pimp as impresario - to humiliate and exploit them.

While there are several fine performances (perhaps especially from the film's writer, Pierre Lestringuez, as a Bordenave, the theatre manager who foreshadows Jules Berry as Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange), the film's most obvious weakness is Hessling, then Renoir's wife, whose acting style is often extremely distracting. While it's natural that Nana would continue to perform offstage as well as on, it's hard to accept that Hessling's version of the character could prove quite so beguiling and dangerous to otherwise intelligent, and powerful, men - though Renoir, perhaps naturally, might not have been in a position to perceive this.

La Fille de l'eau

1925, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir's first film as a solo director immediately introduces one of the director's recurrent tropes, that of a flowing river. While proximity to that river is critical to the development of the film's plot, Renoir's great preoccupations are present only in embryonic form, however, as the film moves somewhat jerkily from one event to the next, sometimes across gaps of logic (or at least credible motivation). The tone, too, is at times uncertain, veering from high melodrama to outright slapstick, at times in the same breath (as in the sequence where a hot-headed young farmer threatens a violent attack, then promptly falls into a tub of water; the dunking in no way cools his ardour, as might have been expected in a more comic register).

Nonetheless, even where Renoir is clearly finding his feet, he displays great creativity with his staging, such as in the remarkable scenes where his heroine (played by Catherine Hessling, Renoir's then-wife) is entrapped first in the bunk of her uncle's barge, and later in a gypsy wagon threatened by fire; both scenes are genuinely suspenseful, with striking placement of the actors in the former sequence. There is also an extended dream sequence that makes creative use of a variety of special effect ideas, whether reversing the film or playing with scale; in the middle of the sequence, a title card with the single word "Délire" appears, which must have been reassuring to any cinema patrons who happened into the theatre during that particular portion of the film.

Partie de campagne

1936, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Although it's not even three-quarters of an hour in length, Partie de campagne has nothing of the feel of a vignette, and it's as packed with incident as any of Renoir's full-length films. It's a beautiful evocation of a very specific time and place - and a fine adaptation of an intensely atmospheric Maupassant short story (although Renoir does not reproduce Maupassant's lingering descriptions of unpleasant agricultural odours). It's also achingly romantic, both in subject matter and tone - with an air of melancholy longing that lingers long after the final credits (the film is, if anything, more melancholy than the original short story, simply because it implies a far longer period of haunted remembering). Although the setting is the late nineteeenth century, it's not hard to imagine an updated version set in the 1930s - after all, the romance of an escape from the city in favour of the countryside banks of the Loire is at the heart of films like La Belle équipe, while the evocation of a young girl's romantic - and sexual - awakening is timeless (Maupassant explicitly compares young Henriette to Shakespeare's Juliet). The one distraction is the poor quality of the subtitles, at least in the print I saw; they don't capture the film's mood properly, and omit important information.

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

1936, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir's 1930s career must surely constitute one of the most extraordinary periods of artistic production in film; he seemed to casually turn out masterpieces almost every year while constantly expanding the limits of what is possible in cinema. This 1936 feature is no exception, and is filmed in a beautifully fluid style that fits an abundance of action into a compact, comprehensible whole. It remains absolutely fresh seventy years after it was made - while simultaneously capturing, as few other films have, something of the spirit of the Popular Front, the alliance of left-wing parties that came to power in elections held a few months after the release of Renoir's film; the heady atmosphere of those years was already in the air when Renoir was filming, and the optimistic portrait of the working class's future is very much of the age.

In portraying the capitalists and those they exploit, Renoir makes use of the conceit of an apartment building - or rather a courtyard - around which all human life revolves, something that crops up quite frequently in French films of the period: René Clair made good use of the idea, while Julien Duvivier exploited a similar location to masterful effect in La Belle équipe, also from 1936, and very much a Popular Front film. The dialogue is by Jacques Prévert, and has a wonderful snap, though it's not always well-served by the workmanlike subtitles (which would, in any case, have a hard time keeping up with the pace), while the acting is almost uniformly strong. Even against that backdrop, though, Jules Berry delivers one of the great performances in French cinema, a wonderfully oily turn as the predatory boss of the publishing house around which the action centers, and who gets his comeuppance in a manner that argues for the occasional intervention of natural justice.