Dir. Jean Renoir, 1932, France, 85 mins
Cast: Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Severine Lerczinska
Kicking off the National Film Theatre’s two-month retrospective on French director, Jean Renoir, is Boudu Saved From Drowning, the film that marked both the peak of his relationship with actor Michel Simon and the first full fruition of the themes and styles that would characterise his work throughout the 1930s.
A riotous though good-natured comedy of manners that slides between farce and social comment, it tells the story of a tramp who is taken in by a well-meaning middle-class family only for him to seduce every woman in sight and generally cause havoc. The frank approach to the seduction scenes and the almost laissez-faire attitude to sexuality still seem refreshingly modern, as does Simon’s performance, which breaks through the acting conventions of the time to seem raw and naturalistic – as if a man really had been thrown off the streets into the studio. For modern viewers, it’s akin to the discovery of De Niro in Mean Streets or Depardieu in Les Valseuses, where the physical presence of the actor felt so powerful, so untamed, that it seemed it could break out from the confines of the film. But Simon arguably maintained this level of expression more successfully throughout his career, even up to such later works as Walerian Borowcyzk’s Blanche (1971).
The sense of immediacy in his performance is complemented by Renoir’s direction, which opens up the stage play on which Boudu is based. He films in long shot on location to give a wider sense of the off-screen world in which the drama takes place, and, for interior scenes, uses in-depth staging and subtle camera movement to allow a greater degree of movement for the actors. The impression is of a film breaking free from the edge of the screen to interact with the spaces around it – a perfect approach for a work whose theme is the disintegration of a bourgeois family in the face of an attractive outsider.
It’s an approach Renoir will develop and perfect in another class drama, his masterpiece La Regle du Jeu (1939), also showing in this season. But if you’re discovering the director for the first time, Boudu is a great place to start – it’s warm, funny and boisterous, the kind of spirited film that liberates Renoir from the rather stuffy reputation forced on him by academia and proves him a populist director for any era.
Michael Bartlett
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