Jean Renoir

Few directors have achieved such a sustained run of form as Jean Renoir did in the 1930s.  The son of the nineteenth century impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, his career began in the mid 1920s and includes a least one silent feature of significance.   However, the core of an oeuvre which extended until the end of the 1960s is the work made between 1931 and 1939.

Renoir was incredibly prolific in this period, his output diverse in terms of subject matter, genre and source material yet unified by an overarching humanism.  As in the films of other great humanist directors like Ford, Kurosawa, and Ozu there are few cardboard villains in Renoir’s cinema.  Every character has credible motivation and equal humanity.  The result is drama - or comedy - of sophistication and resonance, one which finds humour in the most bleak of situations and darkness in the most frivolous.

Socialist in outlook, Renoir’s work is always informed by a sense of class.  His early satirical gem “Boudu Saved From Drowning” critiques the bourgeois lifestyle by contrasting the overly comfortable existence of an aging book seller with that of a suicidal tramp.  The businessman’s efforts to save the reprobate from himself and ‘educate’ him in middle class ways lead initially to social embarrassment (the tramp spits on a precious Balzac first edition and wipes his boots on a silk bedspread) and then to surprising cuckoldry (the tramp sleeps with both the man’s wife and servant mistress).  The final scenes, in which Boudu deliberately sabotages his own bourgeois wedding, choosing a return to itinerant existence over materialism and respectability, see Renoir’s politics blend with the kind of romanticisation of street life found in Chaplin.

A similar theme is explored in Renoir’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s play “The Lower Depths” in which a ruined Baron integrates better than one might think into a community of thieves and beggars.  More reflective of contemporary socialist politics is “The Crime of Monsieur Lange”, the tale of exploited workers taking over a printing house, their leader managing to get away with murdering a nasty, capitalist boss.  The lightness of Renoir’s touch, employing irony and black comedy without losing a sense of the genuine class issues being explored, is masterful.

Renoir’s last three 1930s releases improve on even this standard.  “The Grand Illusion” is a World War I POW drama of lyricism and wit, celebrating camaraderie in the military both within and across nationalistic lines. Patriotism and duty are seen as nonsensical given that senior officers on opposing sides have more in common which each other than with members of their own, respective armies.  Indeed, the war itself is deemed almost inconsequential in the context of broader social trends or the love felt between individuals.

“The Human Beast” is a much darker work, a proto film noir set against a backdrop of the French railway system.  A psychopathic engine driver, aware of his murderous inclinations but unable to bring them consistently under control, is drawn into a love triangle with a minor bureaucrat and his pretty, femme fatale wife.  Again, Renoir’s all embracing sympathy for his characters elevates the crime thriller to the level of tragedy.

Finally, with “Rules of the Game”, Renoir puts his stamp on the whole pre-war era.  Part social satire, part romance, part out right farce, its upstairs/downstairs story of sexual intrigues at a country estate ends on a violent note befitting the coming hostilities.  For all that it attacks the moral bankruptcy of a nation about to put up little resistance to Hitler, Renoir’s more profound theme is one he directly expresses himself on screen: that we all ‘have our reasons’. It is the ultimate humanist credo, alluding to an all forgiving perspective on human weakness evident throughout the director’s long career.