The Big Screen (22 page)

That was not all. The French screen of the early 1930s had another glory, and it came from the Jean Vigo who had warned about the Andalusian dog and its ability to bite, even if it left no teeth marks.

Jean Vigo was born in Paris in 1905 (our heroes are getting younger) and he would be dead in 1934. He was a sickly, impoverished child, suffering from the lung trouble that would kill him. He also observed the fate of his father, a virulent leftist-anarchist known as Miguel Almereyda, who was imprisoned during the Great War on charges of conspiring with the Germans, and who was found in his cell strangled.

Fighting to clear his father's name, Vigo entered the Sorbonne and discovered movies. He was a camera assistant and then, with money given by his father-in-law, he began to make his own picture. As his own cameraman, he took on Boris Kaufman, the younger brother of Dziga Vertov, who had just arrived in France. They made an essay film,
À Propos de Nice
(1930), and then another,
Taris
(1931), about a champion swimmer. Next came
Zéro de Conduite
(1933), a forty-one-minute picture about life (or imprisonment) in a French school, filled with the anarchist loathing of institutions and in love with what film can do. There is an ecstatic slow-motion pillow fight.

Vigo was dying—he was always dying—but he made one feature film,
L' Atalante
(1934), the name of a barge that works the canals and rivers of northern France, lyrically harsh in Kaufman's imagery. The young skipper (Jean Dasté) goes ashore and takes a wife (Dita Parlo). The barge moves on, but young love is soon troubled by the wife's dismay at this unromantic life. She talks to the old man, Le père Jules (Michel Simon), who helps work the barge. She runs away. The skipper goes in search of her.

This is a bare story about simple people—if such things exist. American cinema liked to glorify “simple” people. It was a way of reassuring everyone that a picture was for them. Think of Chaplin's little man and then notice his huge ego. This is a keystone in the American lie, that our lives can be small. Vigo believed that every life is just a pale skin wrapped around a seething inner life, and he knew that film could uncover it.
L' Atalante
is the first film dedicated to that principle made without concession to literary values or political orthodoxy, and free of the muddle that betrays
Sunrise
. Vigo died days after its opening—and the film was a commercial disaster. But regularly now it figures in the top tens of the greatest films ever made. Vigo was and remains the model French example of someone who will die for cinema.
Zéro de Conduite
informs Truffaut's
Les Quatre Cents Coups
in scene after scene (as it does Lindsay Anderson's
If
….).
L' Atalante
's sense of the hopeless necessity of love (the obscurity of desire) affected Godard. Jean-Paul Belmondo does a tribute to Simon in Godard's
Pierrot le Fou
(1965). Michel Simon's performance as the barbaric, filthy, disgusting sailor lives forever, more endearing than movie presidents and the screen's forlorn trail of Jesuses.

But Simon's old man had a brother, a man known only as Boudu, another river creature. And the Boudu we come to now is part of the best story in French film history.

Almost the first memory for Jean Renoir was seeing himself in his father's paintings and drawings. One may be enchanted by this family tie, for the pictures done by Auguste Renoir are as loaded with charm as they are heavy with paint. They are “impressionist masterpieces,” so the auction houses say, but pictures that have also been used as greeting cards such as grandparents may send to grandchildren. The faces look like ripe peaches. The paintings are steeped in nostalgia for perfect childhood. They do not ask awkward questions.

Jean Renoir was born in Montmartre in 1894, the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, so he was looking at these pictures in the late 1890s without quite realizing he had posed for them. His father had noticed him, seen the opportunity of a picture, and taken it—he had snapped it. This was before the boy could read. And in the 1890s, photography began to be a mass practice. Now it affects all of us, nearly all the time. Parents snap their children with cell phones and hold the bright pixels up to the infants' gaze, like a mobile to play with. “There you are!” they say, before the babies possess these words. There we are. It begins to become a basic form of identity, the level at which existence registers. We are our image. Our reality has been split, and that may be as significant as the more famous bifurcation of the atom.

This is not the customary way of approaching Jean Renoir. As a rule, he is called the sturdy bridge between French artistic traditions and movie modernism. Renoir is the medium's great humanist—you can see that in his Octave in
La Règle du Jeu
, so gregarious, so ready to help everyone, a jolly enabler in life, yet a man who conceals his own sadness. That Renoir does exist, and you can meet him as the author of
Renoir, My Father
, the book he wrote about life with Auguste, and in
The Notebooks of Captain Georges
, a novel with the cool eye of Maupassant as well as the longing for affection from Renoir's best films. But Octave is perceived and treated in
La Règle
less as a real person than as an ebullient actor-manager trying to keep the house party and the picture in place. Renoir is complicated, and the complexity rests in the way of seeing he achieved, the style that went with it. As well as what he saw. It has not yet been surpassed or improved upon.

So he was the painter's son who became one of his father's subjects. What a happy household! Except that it is clear from the biographies that Auguste was what the auction houses would want him to be: a larger-than-life and obsessed painter of life and beauty who was like a lion on the veldt of family life, children, and house servants. What I mean by that is that if asked whether he would give up painting or the circumstances of his life (for example, family and home), he would have given up the latter, because he could always paint loneliness.

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,

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.