Cinema of the World

Nostalgie de la Boue

After La Chienne, Jean Renoir and Michel Simon started looking for another film to make together. Several possibilities were considered. There was Emile, about a 'shopkeeper of bicycle accessories in Provence',1 written by the comic writer Jacques Deval (best known for Tovarich), and an adaptation of Jules Laforgue's Hamlet. In the early 1930s, the artist Andre Derain announced that Jean was going to film a scenario of his called Tavuke N'Bongo, written especially for Michel Simon, set in the milieu of rag and bone men. According to Derain, it was 'a social study, a tragi-comic film made with simplicity so that the public will not lose for an instant the thread . . . to make good films, one has to have a sensible scenario, very lively, original, and conceived by an author of rich imagination, beautiful natural decor which abounds in France, and interpreters with expressive masks that have a soul.'2 Simon explained that it was 'neither a comedy nor a drama. It is a human story, very simple. As bare as a parable from the gospels.'3 Although Tavuke N'Bongo was never filmed, it might have set him thinking along certain lines.

Simon, remembering the end of La Chienne, suggested the subject of Boudu sauve des eaux to Jean. He had taken over the title role of the tramp in 1925 on the Paris stage from Marcel Vallee in the play by Rene Fauchois, who himself played M. Lestingois. So keen was Simon to play it again on screen, that he and his friend Jean Gehret, put up the money. Jean, who had had a soft spot for hoboes ever since his introduction to Chariot's Little Tramp, was also excited by the chance to work with Simon on a film that would again question conventional bourgeois values, something the original play had little interest in doing.




Boudu, a scruffy tramp, means to put an end to his life after losing his black mongrel dog in the Bois de Boulogne. But M. Lestingois (Charles Granvil), a bookseller, rescues him from drowning in the Seine and takes him into his home. There Boudu sets about seducing his rescuer's wife (Marcelle Hania) and Anne-Marie, the maid (Severine Lerczinska), Lestingois' mistress. 'One should only help those of one's own class,' concludes the bookseller. ('Happily she's fallen for one of our set,' the marquis comments in La Regie du jeu of his wife's adultery.) However, the disruptive vagabond gradually begins to display certain tame middle-class tendencies, and when he wins 100,000 francs in a lottery, he decides to marry and settle down with Anne-Marie. As the wedding party rows down the Marne, Boudu overturns the boat and disappears beneath the water, presumed drowned. 'It's his destiny to drift with the current (fil de Veau) again,' remarks Lestingois. Once on shore, Boudu abandons his wedding suit and dresses himself in the clothes of a scarecrow, before romping joyously on the banks of the river in celebration of his narrow escape.



The film opens with a scene on a stage where M. Lestingois, disguised as a satyr, is seducing the maid (as a nymph) to the pipes of Pan, a theme which continues with Lestingois' quotations from Greek mythology. Boudu is later referred to as Priapus, and the melody on the flute, played by the neighbour (Jean Gehret) from his window, acts as a seductive call to Boudu's natural soul to return to his life in the open air. However, Renoir's pantheistic symbolism is never underlined, but runs gently like a rivulet through the screenplay.

We are not in ancient Greece but in Paris at a specific time and place: the hot summer of 1932, on the banks of the Marne and on the quais of the Seine at the Pont des Arts. By taking his camera and sound equipment out on location, still a rare occurrence in those days, Renoir gave the film an almost documentary reality; the people in the streets, a marching brass band with children dancing around them, weekend trippers picnicking at the riverside, are all caught for an instant.

One can verify the street realism of the film even today by walking along the Quai Conti on the Left Bank, which has not changed much in six decades; the building where M. Lestingois had his bookshop is still there, and so is the Pont des Arts, from which Boudu jumped, repaired since it collapsed in the early 1970s.

By means of deep-focus photography, Renoir was able to give the Lestingois apartment the feel of a real lived-in space in which man, wife, maid and unwelcome guest interrelate. The director's budding genius is revealed in the way, in order to demonstrate that the family does not live in isolation as the one-set play implies, he gets the maid to shout down to a neighbour in the courtyard for a box of matches to light the stove. (He would soon celebrate community life around a courtyard in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.) There are moments when the camera cuts away from the apartment to 'dead' shots of roofs or Notre Dame, almost comparable to those in the films of the Japanese humanist director Yasujiro Ozu, who was also developing his personal style that year, though neither knew each other's work at the time.

Although these shots offer tantalising glimpses of a world outside the apartment and bookshop, Renoir does not denigrate Lestingois or the life he leads. As played by Charles Granvil, he is rather lovable - witness his slipping a student (Jean Daste) a free copy of Voltaire's Lettres d'Hamabed, because the young man cannot afford it. Boudu, who has no respect for books, spits in Balzac's The Psychology of Marriage. Despite his periodic irritation at Boudu's antics, Lestingois never really regrets his initial kindness, and continues to treat his rescuee rather like a large pet.

A component in the creation of the character of Boudu was derived from Jean's memory of a mongrel of his called Jerry, named after the dog in the Jack London story, Jerry on the Island, who kept running away. As Boudu, Michel Simon, giving one of the greatest of screen performances, often behaves and looks like an orangutan in a cage, swinging on the doorframe, rolling on a table and turning somersaults. His twitching, jaunty walk indicates constant inebriation (a walk unequalled until Jean-Louis Barrault's Monsieur Opale in Renoir's Le Testament du docteur Cordelier in 1959), and his inability to handle objects - his comic puzzlement at what to do with a table napkin, or how to fill a kettle - present a man ill at ease with the restrictions of home life. After he smears boot polish on his shoes, he wipes it off with a satin bedspread, a scene which provoked gasps of horror from the first audiences, especially women.

The exhilarating last few minutes of Boudu are a perfect marriage of style and content. The camera drifts away from the band playing the 'Blue Danube' at the wedding feast on the banks of the river to the boating party. While his bride rests her head on his shoulder, Boudu sees a water lily floating nearby. He attempts to grab it and overturns the boat. After drifting along like a male Ophelia, he gets o the shore, divests himself of his bourgeois suit, dresses as a tramp again, bums a sandwich from a young couple and shares it with a goat.

His liberty is then expressed with the use of a rapturous and lingering 360-degree pan (Pan?) starting with Boudu, taking in the hat he has thrown away into the water, and river scenes - people rowing, walking along the bank, and shimmering water under a bridge. The film ends with a view of the sky and a steeple above a chorus of singing clochards on the march.

It is not too fanciful to see the film as a reflection of Jean's own new-found freedom from marriage and his own anti-conformist attitudes for which Boudu was his surrogate. The Renoir film, which changed the slant of the stage original, was as far from the world of boulevard comedy as it could get, particularly the ending. In the play, the anarchic tramp is reintegrated into society by marrying the maid; in the film, Boudu, on the wedding day, escapes at the last moment, regaining his untrammelled existence. When Fauchois first saw the film, he accused Jean of betraying him and threatened to have his name removed from the credits. But some 30 years later, a short while before his death in 1962, when Boudu had gained a certain reputation, the playwright changed his mind. 'A very free adaptation of my play, Boudu properly belongs to Renoir,' he said. 'Its merits are an achievement before whose mastery it is only honest to bow.' (Down And Out In Beverly Hills, directed by Paul Mazursky in 1986, was loosely based on Boudu. It began as a familiar satire on the bourgeois Californian life-style led by Richard Dreyfuss and family, a life disrupted by tramp Nick Nolte, who teaches them better values, but Mazursky ditched Renoir's ending for a comfortable, toothless one.)

Boudu sauve des eaux was greeted coolly when first shown. Another Renoir flop, it only reached the general British public in 1965, and Americans in 1967. In fact, so much of Boudu exemplifies what made Jean Renoir a great director; the improvisatory air, the fluent camerawork always at the service of the screenplay, the small human details that provide an added dimension to the characters who never become stereotyped, and who always have his understanding, and often his love; the constant relationship between the characters and their environment; a sense of place and community, and a genuine, unsentimental joie de vivre. There are no heroes and villains. Each is stupid and wise, noble and petty. Renoir's cinema is egalitarian. Events and people are never taken at face value. Individuals are trapped by the rules of the social game; masters and servants, bosses and workers, officers and men, bourgeois and clochard.










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Language:French
Subtitles:English
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