The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  If we look at Auguste’s human groups and wish we were there, or at his splendid female nudes and wish there was a there here, then we may recognize the domestic uneasiness whereby he required household servants who were lovely enough to inspire him. And this was a life Madame Renoir adapted to, for she had been his model once and was a favorite subject later as “mother.” This helpless recycling of reality into art, with at least a caress in the transition, is something touched on in Renoir’s film French Cancan (1954), where Danglard (Jean Gabin) is an impresario of live performance who seduces all his female discoveries and then moves on. Is that betrayal or passing time? “Why should Cupid have wings?” asks the epigraph to La Règle du Jeu (taking the line from Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro), “If not to fly away again?”

  Then you need to look at the face of Auguste Renoir—in photographs or in his own paintings—and admit the selfishness and the fierceness. Some will say that look comes from the pain of his arthritis. But then you should recollect his own wry admission, that as his hands became stricken, he painted with a brush tied to his hard-on.

  Jean Renoir was the child of that man, his subject and his spectator. He was well educated and then, at the age of twenty, he went to war. As a lieutenant in the Alpine Infantry, he was so badly wounded he limped for the rest of his life. His mother, Aline, traveled to help nurse him after that wound—it was a close call—and she died soon thereafter. Recovered, Jean joined the Flying Corps, as an observer and then a pilot. He crashed and was sent back to Paris, where he began to look after his father (who would die in 1919, aged seventy-eight). He was drawn to Andrée Heuschling, a beautiful young woman who had been hired as Auguste’s final model. When his father died, Jean married Andrée, and it was as he looked at her that his vague plans to be a ceramicist fell away and he resolved to put her in a movie. “She was sixteen years old,” Jean would write later,

  red-haired, plump and her skin “took the light” better than any model that Renoir had ever had in his life. She sang, slightly off key, the popular songs of the day; told stories about her girl friends; was gay; and cast over my father the revivifying spell of her joyous youth. Along with the roses, which grew almost wild at Les Collettes [their country house at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the South of France], and the great olive trees with their silvery reflections, Andrée was one of the vital elements which helped Renoir to interpret on his canvas the tremendous cry of love he uttered at the end of his life.

  It’s telling that Renoir places Andrée at the level of the flowers and the trees, and it prepares us for the remarkable sense of cinematic context in Jean Renoir’s films—a thing that at first easily looks like “nature” or reality. But what settles in during the course of his long career is the theater-like subterfuge in which that reality is altered by the nature of the site where we meet it, the screen. Along the way, and in the 1930s especially, no one developed a more complete illusion of the rapport between filming and the world it looked at.

  As a child, Jean had been introduced to the movie screen at a department store in the company of the family maid, Gabrielle. He didn’t like it, and had to be taken out, crying. It was a film about a river—or that’s what he said Gabrielle told him years later. But by then he had grasped the magic of rivers.

  As a young man, Renoir saw movies, and generally preferred American films. He was trying to be a potter and a ceramicist, but he and Dédée (as he called his wife) were drawn to the screen. “We went…nearly every day, to the point that we had come to live in the unreal world of the American film. It may be added that Dédée belonged to the same class of woman as the stars whose appearance we followed on the screen. She copied their behavior and dressed herself like them. People stopped her in the street to ask if they had not seen her in some particular film, always an American film.”

  So they began as a team: he wrote Catherine (1924) and directed La Fille de l’Eau (1925), and they led to an ambitious venture: Nana (1926), adapted from Zola, two hours long, with the German actor Werner Krauss (he had played Caligari) as Muffat. It was an expensive failure and not good enough to conceal the conclusion that Catherine Hessling (Dédée’s professional name) is not compelling. They did a few more things together, including two short films—Sur un Air de Charleston (where she dances with the American Johnny Hudgins) and La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes (from Hans Christian Andersen). But Renoir was making other films without his wife, a dangerous path in cinema history. Then, in 1931, with sound, he wanted to make a film adapted from a novel and a play. It was called La Chienne, and it was a good role for Catherine. But the studio willing to make the film had another actress under contract, Janie Marèse. Renoir yielded to commerce. “This betrayal marked the end of our life together. Catherine could not bear the disappointment. I offered to sacrifice myself by giving up La Chienne, and she refused the offer, hoping that I would insist. But I did not insist; and this was the end of an adventure which should have been pursued in happiness. The cinema was for both of us a jealous god.”

  Catherine Hessling appeared in only three more films and then retired from acting. She died in 1979, only months after the death of Jean.

  The overlap of nature and contrivance was apparent from the start in La Chienne. It is the story of a henpecked clerk, Legrand (Michel Simon). He is a Sunday painter and a sad man, and he falls for a prostitute, Lulu. He steals from the office to meet her financial needs. But she gives the money to her pimp, Dédé (Georges Flamant). When Legrand discovers this, he kills Lulu. Dédé is arrested and executed. Legrand ends up as a tramp, who one day sees that one of his paintings is selling for serious money.

  You could say the irony of the conclusion is “very French” (and when Fritz Lang remade the story in Hollywood as Scarlet Street [1945], he had trouble with the censors over a killer going free). But the story also shows an American influence, for this is a narrative hinged on desire: Can Legrand transform his life? Can he win and redeem Lulu (as Richard Gere cleans up Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman)? Can he be a success as a painter? Can he get rid of his wife, an odious shrew?

  There’s another twist: in life, Michel Simon fell for Janie Marèse, but the actress was infatuated with Georges Flamant, who in his own life was an underworld figure, as dangerous as Dédé. As the shooting ended, Flamant purchased an American car and took Marèse for a drive. There was a crash. She was killed. Michel Simon was devastated. Filmmakers rather take the infection of melodrama for granted, while audiences crave it to end their boredom.

  So the balance of France and America in La Chienne is intriguing. But whereas in Hollywood in 1931, for the most part, the storytelling machine was struggling with the challenge of sound, in France, Renoir was liberated by it. With sound to assist the action—through talk, music, and sound effects—Renoir seems to have identified the fluency of the camera and let it run. So what was once a stage play becomes casually cinematic. La Chienne is about the houses people live in, about a moving camera tracking and craning and panning, and a depth of focus that beckons movement, links one person to another, and all people to their setting, their context. With wonderful immediacy—and it has fragrance still, eighty years later—we feel we are there, turning to look, eager to see. In America, this enlarged reality is of enormous assistance in identification: we want to be there, we want to be these people.

  In Renoir, that urge exists, too, but an ironic distancing still prevails. We feel we are being shown a story. We feel the intelligence of direction. We detect the irony. It has the same spirit as Renoir recounting the anecdote (bittersweet) of Marèse, Flamant, and Simon like a Maupassant story, an incident recounted over dinner, with us as eavesdroppers. But it is a story without prejudice: Legrand is a chump, Lulu is a slut, Dédé is spiteful—but so what? In an American movie of that period, those roles would be cast in iron, but in Renoir, we begin to take on the camera’s patient and not unkind neutrality. There is no need for judgment. In life, after all, some things work out untidily, and not at the behest of
fate.

  A distributor took on La Chienne and decided to open it in Biarritz, with this proviso: he would advertise it in advance with the warning that it was shocking and unpleasant. The film was packed out, and soon duplicated that success in Paris. American methods were avidly imitated. Often so close to poverty that he was driven to sell some of Auguste’s paintings, Renoir at last had a career of his own.

  He moved forward now with new impetus. His next film was La Nuit du Carrefour (still little seen outside France), an Inspector Maigret story coscripted with Georges Simenon, and with Renoir’s brother Pierre playing Maigret. Then he was back with Michel Simon on another play, Boudu Sauvé des Eaux (by René Fauchois), though it is scarcely credible from the easygoing documentary texture of its riverbank Paris that the stage lies behind this story. Boudu is Renoir’s first masterpiece, though equal ownership belongs to Simon. (Let me modify “masterpiece”; it’s the slick jargon of film reviewing. At Giverny, which lily is the masterpiece? Aren’t they all ordinary?)

  We are in Paris on the banks of the Seine, where a bookseller, Lestingois, is in the habit of watching the world go by through a telescope. He spies a “perfect tramp,” Boudu, about to enter the river. Why? He has lost his dog? He is fed up with life? Or is he a natural river rat? Lestingois is brave and charitable enough to rescue the water creature.

  If only he had known! Boudu comes into the household and spreads merry hell before—having been urged to marry the maid (Lestingois’s mistress)—he sits in a boat and a bowler hat for his wedding ceremony, reaches out for a lily, tips the boat over, and returns to his river…like a cork?

  Over fifty years later, the story was remade by Paul Mazursky as Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The bum was Nick Nolte now, shabbily glamorous, and a bit of a hippie genius in the end. The openness of Renoir’s film could not survive. In Boudu, the satire is gentle but firm, and Boudu is an authentic savage, not too far from insane, without any of the coy canniness that Nolte had to have—stars hate to look stupid or alien. There is no river, either. And it takes a wayward copyist to redo Boudu without a river—though Beverly Hills may owe some of its nervous aridity to the absence of such a lazy, serene facility.

  Renoir’s film loves contingent space; it revels in the light of summer in the city; and it is drawn to the river, a constant flow not bothered to distinguish between prosperity and haplessness. Boudu is an outsider, or so it seems. But Lestingois is every bit as strange and “homeless.” Yes, he has his house, but he is eccentric, or displaced. He is a fool—a character we suddenly realize is not often admitted in American cinema. Of course, Boudu and Legrand (both embodied by Michel Simon) are creatures who slip away from society and normality. What makes the films so ambiguous is the way Renoir’s camera cannot mock them or believe they are wrong. Normality feels all the less likely in their absence. Twenty years later, in India, Renoir would emerge from something like despair with a film called The River, in which a well-to-do English family of jute merchants lives side by side with penniless mystics and beggars on the banks of the Ganges. No judgment is called for. No certainty is offered about the proper way to live. The story and particular human hopes are swimming in the river’s flow. A war was to come between Boudu and The River, but nowhere on earth in the early 1930s was anyone delivering such films in which the supple use of the medium, of space and context, could leave a small incident so durable and questioning.

  Quite simply, Renoir enlarged our sense of human behavior in the way he looked at it, and in the assumption that we were adult enough to make up our own minds. The Lestingois household is tenderly satirized. The middle-class world is teased. At one moment, having been given five francs by a child, Boudu thinks to open the car door for a gentleman motorist, dreaming of a tip. But the self-important fellow has come out without a coin (a Warren Buffett habit), so Boudu gives him the five francs. All of this on a sunny day in the park where you can smell Paris—and no city has given itself to film more contentedly.

  There are sets in the film for the interior of the house, but what is more striking is the use of real premises on a quai so that we see the outside framed by the inside. There are beautiful interior shots, of one person in another room, with action involving others in a room behind, joined by an archway or a corridor. (There are similar compositions to be found in Auguste Renoir paintings.) At a key moment, when Boudu is seducing Mme Lestingois, he backs into a door, it yields, and there are Lestingois and the maid cozying up. That’s what determines that Boudu shall marry the maid. This is asserted in an instant, and it’s a sign of Renoir’s instinct for the daft sweeps of human error. Everyone makes mistakes—it is the prelude to his more famous motto, that everyone has his or her reasons.

  All of this is so vibrantly casual and lifelike. Yet Boudu Sauvé des Eaux is not simply a slice of life. It’s as pretty and organized as a tarte tatin. It begins with a theatrical tableau in which Pan (Simon) seizes a maiden. It artfully makes use of music—a slapdash marching band, a small orchestra at the wedding, a minor character who plays the flute, plus the sirens and horns of traffic and the city. The ear for rustling life is akin to the eye for background detail and the apprehension that human foreground is vain and silly—we are all other people’s background. But foreground and background have been married on the flatness of a screen. Renoir fondly searches out the illusion of depth, but loves the staginess of the screen.

  So much is en passant, offhand, and as if improvised; even the pan shots creak a bit. Simon’s Boudu turns handstands, he sits jammed in a doorway, does a whirl and nearly falls over; he makes faces, like a baby trying out expressiveness. He is a vagrant but a dancer, too, a lost being and a found actor. The film is just a lily, but it persuades you to need lilies. And the love is Renoir’s, as he comes into possession of this medium and realizes it is a way of seeing to last a lifetime.

  He goes to Normandy to make a version of Madame Bovary (1933). It ends up three hours, and the system cuts it to two. Valentine Tessier plays Emma, and she and Jean are very close. Pierre Renoir is Charles. I lack the space to glory in every film. He goes to south to make Toni (1935), a melodrama taken from a newspaper story. He does the exhilarating Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), a film about a collective, with the whey-faced Parisian hero writing cowboy stories about “Arizona Jim.” Renoir moves close to the Popular Front and makes La Vie Est à Nous for the Communist Party. This is the one moment in his life when, alarmed by fascism, Renoir adopts answers—and he is not comfortable with certainty.

  Then Pierre Braunberger asks him to make a picture of Maupassant’s short story “Partie de Campagne.” The Dufour family from Paris go out to the country one Sunday in the summer of 1860. They come to an inn run by Père Poulain (Renoir himself). Two young men, Henri and Rodolphe, are staying at the inn, and they fasten on the Dufour women, notably their daughter Henriette. Henri and Henriette have a tryst on the riverbank after he has taken her off in his boat. It is brief but intense. And then, on the sad wings of Joseph Kosma’s music, years later, the lovers meet again for a moment, but then she is called away by her inadequate husband. People do bold things and make mistakes. How can anyone tell which is which? The rest is resignation and the remainder of life.

  It was always Renoir’s belief that the film should stay a short (it is forty minutes), though Braunberger seems to have been so impressed by the footage that he begged the director to go for feature length. That could only have meant showing the disappointing marriage and probably resorting to a second affair between the brief-encounter lovers. Renoir rejected that expansion, in part because he believed films should find their natural length, as opposed to set commercial forms. And because he felt the sadness was sufficiently conveyed to be left to our imagination. Of course, this is not another version of “they lived happily ever after,” that keystone of popular cinema. It is not easy to name a Hollywood love story from 1936 (or any neighboring year) in which the perspective of growing older is so bleak. (Leo McCarey’s Make Way for To
morrow is a contender.)

  The shoot took place near Marlotte, where Renoir had counted on summer. He had a remarkable corps of assistants: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacques Becker, Luchino Visconti, Yves Allégret. Winds blew and the rain fell, but the mistake in the weather suited the tone of the story. Still, it imposed delays, so Renoir was compelled to give up the project to honor his commitment on Les Bas-Fonds (1936). Partie de Campagne was left to be edited by his lover, Marguerite Houle—she took the name of “Renoir” for a time—and it was not released until 1946. So it gained the reputation of a film “maudit” (one neglected or spoiled), and curtailed by events. In fact, if anything was left out, the omission adds to the impact of the picture.

  Truffaut said Partie de Campagne was “a film of pure sensation; each blade of grass tickles our face.” That indicates not just the father’s influence but also the way, in the 1930s at least, a filmmaker could be ravished by the simplicity of filming a place, the light, a face. When the two men throw back the shutters at the inn to reveal Henriette and her mother on swings in the garden, the camera edges forward like a cat seeing a mouse. The grass may tickle, but the light has a dappled radiance—there was enough sunshine for it to be remembered, and filmed light is like a diary item, beyond reproach or dispute—that day near Marlotte, at three in the afternoon, there was some brief glory to be beheld. Renoir was a director who felt this was an essential duty or pleasure in filmmaking.

  But the river in this film is so much more than radiance. And when love is made, there is a sudden close-up of Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) that is shockingly large and exposed—“trapped, almost wounded,” said Pauline Kael. It carries the surprise of sex along with the dismay that this may be the first and last time, for Henriette knows she has been taken by a casual seducer. In a longer film, perhaps, Renoir would have had to allow Henri to fall in love with her. But sometimes sex means more to one person than another, and in sex everyone has his or her reasons. What is realistic in the story and the film is the simple, pitiless understanding that this is the way of the world. And for ships that pass in the night, or the day, the river is a facilitating medium, without memory or morality. So the movie needs only one brief reunion to measure the mistake, and the way in which Henriette will never forget it. It becomes a film about destiny, memory, and time—and a river is always the same, if always transient. It is like the present tense: beautiful but indifferent, the perfect subject for moving photography.