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The triangle ("lui, elle, et l'autre") is an old stone, Jean Renoir tosses it into the fountain to make ripples. The camera is inside an ascending dumbwaiter in a little sendup of The Last Laugh's famous opening, distant Moulin Rouge lights are glimpsed at the company dinner and there's the timorous clerk (Michel Simon) at the end of the table, looking like Zola squashed. He skips the party and runs into the masochistic kitty (Janie Marèse), a later shot tilts up from the gutter to reveal the couple embracing on a sloping Montmartre corner. At home there's the battle-axe widow (Magdeleine Bérubet) and stacks of unsigned canvases, the mistress meanwhile only has eyes for the sharpie who pimps her out (Georges Flamant), "he has manners but he's easily led astray." (Roger Gaillard as the lost sergeant completes the arrangement, a sham military hero exposed in a domestic coup de théâtre.) Renoir loves his fantoches, they stumble out of stage curtains and onto documentary sidewalks to discover the tragicomedy of interconnection, everybody's strings are tangled. The beauty of wholeness (the protagonist shaves in his makeshift atelier, music is heard, the camera tracks and shifts focus to find a neighboring little girl playing the piano) has its fatal side, too—a different melody bridges the traveling singers in the street and the drama in the flat on the top floor, where the mocking Lulu sprawls on a bloodstained bedsheet. (The theme of prostitution links the fashionable parlor and the underworld dive, a painter's position: "You know what they say about artists...") Blackmail and The Blue Angel are visible, McCarey has the sloshed homecoming in Ruggles of Red Gap, Pabst dissolves are prevalent. Simon in rags for the ferocious epilogue prepares Boudu, along with the line between degradation and freedom: Life's a bitch and life's beautiful, and art for Renoir must be more than one thing at once. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |