The Big Screen (23 page)

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 Tomorrow
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.

Renoir had reached fluency by then. He knew how to see his world; he had established the grouping of people and space and the rhythm of long shots. You can speak of it as mastery, or you could use the language of
la caméra stylo
, a theory formulated after the war by Alexandre Astruc (novelist, critic, and exceptional filmmaker—his
Une Vie
[1958], also from Maupassant, is a film worthy of Renoir).
La caméra stylo
means a way of writing with film, a kind of natural, eloquent, but unforced prose style—beautiful without seeming posed or chosen. Renoir's camera always indicates a casual human observer who has magically been given privileged vantages.

But mastery in film can often push a director toward bigger or “more important” subjects. It's not quite that Renoir struggled with that dilemma. Still, he was a professional who wanted success or attention, and in practice he chose worthy subjects—
Les Bas-Fonds
(from Maxim Gorky);
La Marseillaise
(1938; an amiable, untidy version of the French Revolution based on the writing of the song);
La Bête Humaine
(1938; from Zola); and
La Grande Illusion
(1937), so telling a sermon against war and for friendship that it was actually nominated for Best Picture by the American Academy.

I am not as uneasy with
La Grande Illusion
as some other writers: the great Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, thought its “cowardly pacifism” was “quite overrated.” “Cowardly” is too much, but “overrated” is helpful. The film
is
a little too tidy or arranged. We are in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Two of the French prisoners are Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Maréchal (Jean Gabin). Fresnay is allowed to make Boeldieu a cut-and-dried aristocrat, whereas Gabin's Maréchal is a starry man of the people—not just common but dangerously archetypal. This is bearable, but then you reach the best (and worst) thing in the picture: Erich von Stroheim as von Rauffenstein, commandant of the prison, and a flying ace who has been invalided into this depressing post.

The point of the story is that a bond exists between Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein that is more significant than the ties among Frenchmen: class works. I think Cabrera Infante is correct in saying this is a throwback to the Great War (so relevant to Renoir himself) but alien to the mood left by the next war and at odds with Renoir's deeper sense of human isolation (if we all have our reasons we are alone). Von Stroheim is superb, enchanting, and immaculate—pick your own label, but serve it with ham. He is not a mess, and Renoir's greatness lies there. But von Stroheim was a problem for Renoir:

As they fought, Renoir wept and said he would give up directing the film! You see how devious this genuine man could be—he was a director. Of course, von Stroheim yielded and then “followed my instructions with a slavish docility.” Maybe, but the film can never quite shrug off the noble sentimentality attached to Rauffenstein and his indefatigable resolve to be a tragic hero—or a drama queen.

La Règle du Jeu
was not nominated for Best Picture—that is a more promising sign—but its aristocrat, Robert de la Chesnaye (played by Marcel Dalio, a prisoner in
La Grande Illusion
), is one of the greatest messes in film history. Better still, the film was a complete flop, released at a time of chronic uneasiness in France (July 1939), and only upsetting audiences the more.

This was not a literary adaptation, but an original, written by Renoir himself, with Carl Koch and Camille François (uncredited). Renoir hoped it would be “a good little orthodox film,” not a big subject. He added that “It was a war film, and yet there is no reference to war.” It's a fascinating distinction, and a reason why in July 1939 the picture unsettled audiences afraid of war. Just a few months later the outbreak of European war helped build the audience for
Gone With the Wind
—though that movie has more confidence in heroines and society than Renoir could muster.

Shot in the La Sologne area in a sunless late winter,
La Règle du Jeu
is a country house film. La Chesnaye and his wife, Christine, have invited a group of society friends to the country for the weekend. This includes his mistress, Geneviève, and a transatlantic flier, André Jurieu, who blurted out his love for Christine on the radio as he landed at Le Bourget. Another member of this extended family is Octave, everyone's friend yet an isolated and classless figure. He and Christine have known each other since childhood, and Octave is willing to be go-between and amateur ringmaster to the whole weekend. He is played by Renoir himself, limping a little in a shabby raincoat and the battered hat the director preferred. So he is a director on camera as well as off, and palpably the other actors enjoy this game and its theatricality. In addition, Renoir fell in love with his script girl, Dido Freire, so he had a reason for acting. She would become his second wife.

Octave has another side to his life. His shifting status takes him below stairs, too, into a romantic intrigue that matches that among the classy people. The gamekeeper, Schumacher, has a wife, Lisette, who is Christine's maid. Lisette is a flirt, and her eye will fall upon Marceau, a local poacher and thus Schumacher's worst enemy. As the weekend rolls out, so the several romantic affairs and the two classes become tangled in what seems at first exhilarating farce, but which will end as bleak tragedy—but not before Octave and Christine have declared their love. In a Mozartian whirl of assumed costume and mistaken identity, one character is shot by another—I won't name them, for some of you will not have seen the film (and you must).

Every sort of spatial relationship—of foreground and background action, and of the depth of field that covers them all—is put to work. The film feels utterly spontaneous, but of course it is carefully contrived. It's just that liveliness conceals the care. (This is a key to the best cinema.) And the collision of comedy and mishap is like a real accident. This fatality is foretold in the famous shooting sequence when the house party goes out with their guns to build a funerary pile of birds and rabbits. This is shot and cut as if by Eisenstein, though I think its unexpectedness (in a Renoir film) is more painful than anything in Soviet film.