French Cancan

Director Jean Renoir on the set

Jules Chéret posters

FRENCH CANCAN             A                                                                                             France  Italy  (102 mi)  1955  d: Jean Renoir

Yes, it’s true.  I’m his mistress and I’m proud of it.                                                                    —Nini (Françoise Arnoul)

Renoir’s first film made on his native soil since RULES OF THE GAME (1939), having fled to America during the Nazi occupation, this celebrates all the remarkable attributes of a “Renoir” film, becoming a loving tribute to Parisian bohemian life immersed in candy-colored images that border on French cliché.  While it’s a Technicolor extravaganza, the film revisits La Belle Époque of the 1890’s in all its cinematic glory, eliminating the filthy streets and squalor in order to invoke a more glamorous atmosphere of dreamy Paris, providing a kind of ho-hum storyline written by Renoir and screenwriter André-Paul Antoine, both getting their starts in the 1920’s, where the dance sequences add a needed shot of adrenaline, evoking the paintings of Degas and the Impressionists, including the director’s own father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with the screen literally exploding with music, dancing, and color, especially during the spectacular finale.  Based on the life of Charles Ziedler (changed to Danglard, played by Jean Gabin, Renoir’s star through much of the 30’s), the man who founded the Moulin Rouge on the site of the old Cabaret of the White Queen, it is a story going back to Renoir’s roots in Montmartre, the world of his childhood and of his father.  The film was extremely popular at the box office, praised as a tour de force success, even by the young guns at Cahiers du Cinéma, including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard, who otherwise delighted in scathing rebukes of French films in general, except those of Renoir, running several pieces, accompanied by a positive review from editor André Bazin, who described the director as having reached a level of maturity, and was at the pinnacle of his “classical style,” claiming he couldn’t “imagine a more perfect homage to Auguste Renoir.”  Released in America as ONLY THE FRENCH CAN, with supposedly inappropriate footage cut, Renoir’s American films were not highly regarded in France, with many still angered that he left the country during the war, and were inclined to believe that he was an artist in decline, though Éric Rohmer at Cahiers considered THE SOUTHERNER (1945) “the apex of Renoir’s work,” with some praising the pre-war Renoir “of the left” while others praised the post-war Renoir of “pure cinema.”  Danglard is the aging protagonist, a nightclub impresario who shrewdly thinks he can take a hopelessly outdated dance club in a disreputable working-class neighborhood and turn it into a popular new attraction, a French cabaret associated with a chorus line of female dancers doing the can-can in skirts and petticoats doing high kicks, splits, and cartwheels, as depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine, often exposing their undergarments, which was considered scandalous at the time, with societal attempts to suppress it.  Part biopic, part romance, and part backstage musical, this is the only Renoir film that features a director, with the irrepressible Danglard serving as his alter-ego, having his own way of handling performers, where balancing the various temperaments and eccentricities as well as their many talents while putting on a cabaret show parallels Renoir’s own working methods of making films, both dedicated only to their art.  For the most part, Danglard doesn’t do or say much, but simply observes, only occasionally intervening, acting as a medium between the stage and the world at large, taking extreme delight in passively allowing the creative process to develop into a cohesive vision.   

Danglard is overtly class-conscious, aware of the appeal to aristocrats and their thrill of “slumming” among the masses, sensing a bit of danger as they rub elbows with criminals, lowlifes, and the common man, enthusiastically describing the experience he envisions, “A taste of the low life for millionaires.  Adventure in comfort.  Garden tables, the best champagne, great numbers by the finest artistes.  The bourgeois will be thrilled to mix with our girls without fear of disease or getting knifed.”  With implications that art breaks down social barriers, a peek behind the scenes allows us to see a developing romance happening simultaneously with the concept of building a show.  For Renoir, film movement is an intrinsic element built into his craft, where the ever-flowing river is the essence of The River (Renoir) (1951), the structure upon which the entire film is based, while this film thrives on dance movement, with bodies perpetually in motion, where Michel Kelber’s camera is always searching for every conceivable camera angle to capture the swirl of motion, where the art of living is captured in that one fleeting moment, while also accentuating waves of color, mirrored in Pierre-Auguste’s painting Bal du moulin de la Galette, which his son actually expands upon in a continually developing relationship with a painting and his own cinematic aesthetic.  It’s the color where this most succeeds, adding details and textures that few other films have found, while perfectly capturing that same spontaneous sense of motion, as if the painting has suddenly come to life, described by Bazin, “Renoir is Impressionism multiplied by the cinema.”  By studying the romantic intrigues of the diverse group of people visiting the popular nightclub, Renoir offers a cross section of society, where we quickly learn that among Danglard’s many attributes is the discovery of new talent in a business he describes to the mother of a young girl he recruits to join his group of dancers as “the most wonderful profession in the world,” with Nini (Françoise Arnoul) infusing life into the story, eventually becoming his lover.  All the various relationships are established during an introductory sequence at a popular Montmartre bar and dancehall, The White Queen, where Danglard, his mistress Lola (Maria Félix), and various hangers-on go dancing as they meet Nini, the laundress, and her jealous, overly possessive, young baker boyfriend Paulo (Franco Pastorino), Michel Piccoli [Le Capitaine Valorgueil] dans ''French Cancan'' (1955) de Jean Renoir YouTube (1:44), a scene that evokes the arrival to Zerlina’s wedding in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an artist who shares Renoir’s spirit of generosity and universality, where nobles and peasants, as well as masters and servants meet in one of the most gorgeous musical ensembles in opera.  From the outset, Danglard is beset with financial woes caused by financier Baron Walter (Jean-Roger Caussimon) in retaliation for his amorous exploits, crossing the line, so to speak, with Lola, the subject of his own amorous interest, using money as a weapon to drive him out of the picture, bankrupting his club while going after his possessions to cover the outstanding debts.  Nonetheless, Danglard shrugs it off with a casual air, always offering a monetary token of his appreciation to beggars on the street, as Renoir has always been fascinated by those living on the margins.  Among his many truisms spoken throughout the film, Danglard seems to be speaking for the entire profession when he says, “We artists are at the mercy of the men with money.”

The European morality on display might seem scandalous in America, with Danglard a serial womanizer balancing three different lovers, Lola, Nini, and a new love Esther Georges (Anna Amendola), initially seen in a neighboring apartment singing what amounts to the theme song heard throughout the film about destitute lovers, written by Renoir, actually sung by Cora Vaucaire, Extrait du film French Cancan (1954) 🎬 - La Complainte de la Butte - Moulin Rouge YouTube (2:59), yet Danglard is married only to his art, where the obvious age difference sets a precedent for the 70-year old Maurice Chevalier in GIGI (1958), as the grey-haired Gabin was 50 when the film was made, where his love tryst with Nini (Françoise Arnoul was 23-years-old at the time) might turn heads, with most believing him to be her father.  Nini quickly gives up her virginity to the baker, believing that’s what she’ll have to sacrifice anyway, thinking a sexual transaction between patron and protégée is all part of the business, but she is pleasantly surprised to discover that’s not a condition of employment, adding an underlying context that sex, money, and the theater are inexorably linked.  Renoir was equally unphased in these matters, having grown up in a household with a casually hedonistic view of women that seems pervasively French, with glaring signs of sexism, but then the same could be said of nearly all films made at the time.  Of note, Nini has her own suitors, rotating between Paolo, Danglard, and a wealthy young foreign Prince Alexandre, played by Giani Esposito, one of the featured stars in Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), who promises to lavish her with jewels and opulence, with Lola veering between Danglard, Walter, and Captain Valorgueil (Michel Piccoli in one of his earliest roles).  There’s no moral denunciation of these multiple partners, though jealousy does rear its ugly head on multiple occasions, typically used to accentuate the drama, yet Renoir is open and honest about it, and does not hide behind any veiled hypocrisy.  When Nini arrives for the strenuous stretch exercises in Madame Guibole’s dance class, it not only reminds us of a Degas sketch, but it foreshadows what’s to come, as the show sequences are overwhelmingly female, where the women become the real stars of the film.  Nonetheless, the cancan dance itself is an erotic spectacle, with little left to the imagination, where it would be hard to deny the level of female objectification, perhaps a textbook example of the male gaze.  Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau were dressed as cancan dancers in the Mexican outback of Louis Malle’s VIVA MARIA! (1965), so there is a level of sexualized carry-over.  Shot entirely on studio sets (the original locations no longer existed), the streets in particular look artificial, lacking the effusive energy of any city street, giving this a very stylized look, lacking the social realism of the director’s earlier French films, causing some to lament a lowering of his standards.  In an interesting aside, Renoir filmed a cancan sequence in his earlier silent era film NANA (1926), Nana (Jean Renoir, 1926): Cancan YouTube (1:32), but he was frustrated by the lack of sound, vowing to make a musical, taking him nearly thirty years.  In a nod to that era, one of the hammiest onscreen performers, Casimir le Serpentin (Philippe Clay), can be seen breaking out into song to the accompaniment of an unseen orchestra.  

Once the Prince enters the picture, and it’s clear Nini doesn’t love him, preferring the love of the theater, she agrees to spend a night on the town with him before he leaves, which allows Renoir to escalate his mythical image of Paris in a heavily romanticized pastiche, shown through a rapidly changing, sequential montage visiting all the nightclubs, which are cabaret acts with painted backgrounds, spending only a minute or so in each, using contemporary singers to impersonate Belle Époque stars, featuring Patachou as Yvette Guilbert, and the legendary Édith Piaf in a brief appearance dressed in her signature black attire as Eugénie Buffet, where the two are inevitably linked in the history of chanson réaliste, Piaf dans 'French Cancan' de Renoir 1954) HD 720p YouTube (42 seconds).  Also included is a montage of Jules Chéret posters for La Taverne Olympia, Les Folies Bergère, and Le Nouveau Cirque, some of which were seen in the opening credits, French Cancan (1955) title sequence YouTube (2:11).  While Nini and the Prince are part of an appreciative audience, their reactions couldn’t be more different, as she’s rapturously delighted, visibly moved by what she sees, while he only has eyes for her, as if lost in a dream that eventually has to come to an end.  That same sense of exaggerated cinematic intoxication drives the exhilarating extravagance of the finale, which essentially shows the birth of Nini as a performer, where a costume drama, a romantic film, and a musical comedy finally merge together in an all-out assault to the senses, where the return of the cancan onstage is associated with nothing less than the liberation of France after the war, where the patriotic delirium is the same, like an ode to joy, as if expressing the very soul of what is quintessentially French.  It’s here that the women are the real stars, bursting out of nowhere, jumping onto the tabletops in their colorful costumes before taking over the expansive floor space, becoming a dazzling and empowering spectacle, as the men simply take a back seat, overwhelmed by the glorious sensuality they see, almost as if they can’t believe their eyes.  This extraordinary visualization represents a return of the very heart of the country, something that had been missing for far too long, where the impact is nothing less than overwhelming, French Can Can dance scene part 1 YouTube (3:04), French Can Can dance scene part 2 YouTube (2:48), French Can Can dance scene part 3 YouTube (3:02).  Despite all the theatrical fireworks, one of the most poignant scenes is a quiet moment of Danglard sitting backstage alone, where we hear the bombastic music onstage, but he’s simply ecstatic with the realization of what he’s created.  The dance offers a striking motif, mirroring the vivid and dynamic women in the Chéret posters we see throughout the film, rhapsodic images of the joy of movement.  The cancan is the culmination and professionalization of earlier styles of dancing practiced throughout 19th century France, adding various international forms of “skirt dancing.”  Its origin is shrouded in mystery, becoming an erotic display of women’s legs, with the lifting of their skirts, the high kicks, and the splits, while also offering a carnivalesque view of their backsides, as the dancers literally embody irrepressible joy, energy, and movement, where the extreme physical pleasure it exudes is nothing less than spectacular, a feast for the eyes, mirroring the enduring legacy of Renoir’s illustrious return to France.              

Watch French Cancan Full Movie Online Free With English ...  entire film with subtitles may be seen on FshareTV (1:43:47)

A Day in the Country (Partie de Campagne)

 

Writer/director Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir with Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Jean comme chasseur, 1910

Jean Renoir, 1911

La Balançoire,1876

Renoir on the set with Sylvia Bataille

Renoir in front of his childhood portrait

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (Partie de Campagne)            A                                                    France  (40 mi)  1946  d: Jean Renoir

Nature has not yet revealed all her secrets.                                                                                  —Monsieur Dufour (André Gabriello)

Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir rarely spent time with his second son, Jean, and when he did, he demanded to be called patron, “the boss.”  Parenting was left to the family’s nanny, Gabrielle Renard, who was only sixteen when she moved into the Renoir home in Paris, spending years with Jean, becoming one of the central influences on his filmmaking career, providing a critical sensitivity, where his father’s paintings often portrayed the French aristocratic class in a sentimental light.  “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” he wrote in his 1974 memoir, My Life and My Films.  “She taught me to detest the cliché.”  In the decade of the 1930’s Renoir made two of the greatest humanist masterpieces ever to reach cinema’s hallowed grounds, THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937) and THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), two class-conscious exposé’s revealing the ugly truth about the bourgeois aristocracy, capturing a precise moment in French history before the Nazi occupation, showing a casual indifference to the coming reality, where Europe has never been the same since.  Yet preceding those crowning achievements comes this small gem of a film, a gentle work of uncommon beauty, evoking the painterly pastoral of the impressionist age in all its enduring appeal, initially planned as two 50-minute adaptations of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, a friend of Renoir’s famous father, one of the seminal figures of French impressionism, reminding us of one of his comments, “In landscape painting I like pictures which make me want to wander about inside them.”  That plan never came to fruition, however, as the initial shoot in the summer of 1936 suffered massive delays due to bad weather, where a planned 8-day shoot in sunny skies extended to seven weeks, going heavily over-budget, as it rained constantly, where the crew mostly played cards and drank wine waiting for the rain to subside, with Renoir forced to exit the project prematurely, unable to shoot several sequences, both the prologue, the family departure from Paris, and a pre-epilogue, a visit to their shop near the end of the story, due to a prior commitment with his next film, THE LOWER DEPTHS (1936).  As a result, this film chronicling a family Sunday outing with both the mother and the daughter having amorous encounters with local young men over a single summer afternoon in 1860 along the banks of the Seine has always remained an “unfinished” project, as those scenes were never completed.  Producer Pierre Braunberger hired poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert to salvage what he could, hoping to expand it to feature length, but he changed the overall tone of the film to something else entirely, so the project was scrapped.  Braunberger tried again after the war when Renoir was making films in America, this time turning to his film editor Marguerite Houllé-Renoir, editing most of his films after 1931, and the director’s lover for many years, eventually taking his surname, though they were never married.  The initial edit was destroyed by the Nazi’s, who ordered the destruction of all French films prior to 1937, but the negatives were smuggled out of the country by Henri Langlois, whose film preservation efforts founded the Cinémathèque Française.  Two intertitles replaced the missing scenes, with Kosma adding a somewhat cliché’d musical score, and the film’s unfinished version had an unenthusiastic premiere ten years later at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, but its reputation has grown over time.  Much lighter in tone than the initial Maupassant story that offers a scathing rebuke of bourgeois manners, included in his 1881 edition of La Maison Tellier, where the testiness between the husband and wife is gone, as she does go off in a boat with a much younger man and giggles a lot, but it’s not because the husband and the apprentice have fallen asleep after drinking too much wine, showing no interest whatsoever in her flirtatious inclinations, it’s because the scheming boatmen provide a distraction, offering the bumbling Laurel and Hardy duo with some fishing rods to keep them occupied.  Despite the overall sunny tone, there is a dark underside, where the bittersweet ending is especially poignant, the story of unrequited love, followed by a wasted life, revealing the heart-wrenching cost of abiding by social convention, as the heroine is complicit in rejecting her own personal happiness in order to keep the young apprentice in the family business.

A blend of cruelty and humanity, the film is very much a family affair, as the cast and crew were family members, friends, or collaborators working for little or no pay, entirely shot on location along the Loing and Essonne tributaries of the Seine River just south of Paris, near Montigny-sur-Loing and the Fontainebleau Forest, where the lighting appears natural, evoking the same impressionistic characteristics as his father’s paintings, yet it’s a refined film, commanded by purely instinctive moments of fleeting happiness, capturing the same essence as the impressionist painters who moved out of their studios and began painting outdoors (en plein air), rejecting classical theory, and instead sought to capture the subjective, fleeting sensations created by gazing at nature’s beauty.  It was impossible to shoot along the Seine where the impressionist painters used to visit in the 19th century because the endless pastoral landscapes had been replaced by the noise and expanse of industry and factories.  Assistant directors included Jacques Becker and Luchino Visconti, who also designed the costumes, while the director’s nephew Claude Renoir assumed the cinematography duties in only his second film, with noted photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson working as his assistant, where perhaps the most memorable shot is an extended tracking shot of the shoreline taken from a boat slowly floating down the river, providing a hypnotic, you-were-there stillness to the experience.  Monsieur Dufour (André Gabriello, an overbearing presence with a surprising resemblance to Oliver Hardy) is a Montmartre shopkeeper borrowing a horse-drawn milkman’s carriage for a long-desired day in the country to celebrate his wife Madame Dufour’s birthday (Jane Marken, who started her career in the silent era and ended up working with Brigitte Bardot in the 50’s), bringing along his near-deaf mother-in-law (Gabrielle Fontan), who communes with a stray cat she randomly finds, his daughter Henriette, sensitive and full of romantic ideals (Sylvia Bataille, wife of noted philosopher Georges Bataille, who appears for a half-second as a student priest along with Becker and Cartier-Bresson), and the dimwitted apprentice shop assistant groomed to be her fiancé, Anatole (Paul Temps, bearing a surprising resemblance to Stan Laurel).  The young boy on the bridge catching a fish is Renoir’s own son Alain, as they stop at a countryside inn for lunch, deciding to eat on the grass picnic style near the banks of the river.  The innkeeper is none other than Renoir himself, who makes the sarcastic remark, “Parisians always eat on the grass,” Day In The Country, A (1936) -- (Movie Clip) Feed Them To ... YouTube (3:24), with editor Margeurite Renoir acting as the waitress, encountering two boaters, the quietly pensive and melancholic Henri (Georges D’Arnoux, aka Saint-Saens), and the more overtly frivolous Rodolphe, wearing a hair net for his moustache (Jacques Brunius, aka Borel, artist, critic, and assistant director to Luis Buñuel on L’ÂGE D’OR), who leeringly spy on the family and immediately plot to seduce the women, utterly enchanted by the scene of a playfully giddy Henriette on the swing, Day In The Country, A (1936) -- (Movie Clip) I'm Sure They' ...  YouTube (3:09), a reference to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting La Balançoire, The Swing (Renoir).  After gorging themselves for hours, with both men passing out from the wine, the young boaters make their move, offering to take the ladies up the river in their boats, needing permission from Monsieur Dufour, who allows the women to go off alone with complete strangers, easily bribed with fishing poles, with both men looking like complete idiots using them, catching an old shoe and each other on the hooks, accentuating how completely out of place bourgeois values are in the countryside.  While Maupassant describes in detail only Henriette and her mother, keeping the natural setting in the background, this is a quintessential Renoir film, who preferred filming on location, with directly recorded sound, adding his own unique stamp on the rest of the characters, each with their own distinct personalities, creating numerous touches of humor and irony, which are not present in the original, but most essentially he makes nature a key element, with landscape a predominate presence. 

While the film opens and closes with views of the river, providing a sense of flow linking humans with the natural world, one of the more tender scenes is between mother and daughter, where the more reserved Henriette acknowledges feelings of “yearning,” as the sounds of nature have opened up her eyes to the beauty of the world around her, awakening her desires, perhaps for the very first time, where “it almost makes you want to cry,” which is a key element of the film, sensuous and lyrical, suffused with the rhythms of nature, Partie De Campagne | Yearning | Jean Renoir YouTube (40 seconds).  Henriette represents a youthful sense of joy, like the longing of young lovers in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls (2003), or the dream of finding an idyllic love in Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971), with the film capturing the texture of the times, creating a mosaic of lasting impressions, where the director takes a personal story and transforms it into a reflection on the innocence of youth, lost dreams, and missed opportunities.  While Madame Dufour enjoys a carefree fling with Rodolfe, who assumes a Pan-like presence comically chasing her through the fields in a theatrical farce, play acting the game of love, Henri and Henriette row to a secluded island cove that he describes as his private office, where they are greeted by the sound of a nightingale, which brings a poignant tear to her eye, before actually finding love.  At first fending off his advances, where one senses a lingering possibility of rape, with storm clouds appearing on the horizon, yet in one magical moment they kiss, leading to a sexual awakening with mixed emotions, yielding to a man who believes in “love eternal,” quickly growing embarrassed at the fleetingness of the moment, both discovering what love brings, with all its entanglements and complexities, yet she is literally swept off her feet, stunned by the transformation, as a rainstorm quickly sweeps across the river with a darkened flurry, apparently washing the sins away.  The film jumps ahead in time, with a titlecard reading “Years passed with Sundays as bleak as Mondays.  Anatole married Henriette, and one Sunday…” the husband and wife return to the island, like a fond memory, but exactly like Monsieur Dufour before him, Anatole nods off in a slumber, leaving Henriette devastated by the emptiness of the experience, so she is pleasantly surprised to see Henri lurking in the tall grass, both profoundly affected by their earlier encounter, caught in their idealized notion of love, seemingly frozen in time, discovering how much the nostalgic memory of that day has meant to both of them, as Henri acknowledges he frequently returns to this spot, where the overriding sentiment is how the waves of time have inevitably altered their lives forever, with love no longer playing a part, as Anatole has married into the family business, while Henriette’s “yearning” has been sacrificed, steamrolled into submission to make way for the future.  It’s one of the most heartbreaking endings imaginable, where happiness is thwarted by family ambition, as all her youthful hopes and dreams have become secondary to the moral practicalities of marriage and social respectability, where the sunny tones and breezy spontaneity of youth have turned to regret, despair, and alienation, much like the bleak ending of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964).  Just how unfinished this film may be remains a contentious issue, as the director himself refused to add or change a single frame, where it was designed to be a short film, with long summer days and balmy afternoons by the riverside, exploring whether the short form could be as dramatically complex and artfully crafted as a feature-length film, with none other than André Bazin, arguably France’s most influential film critic, describing it as a “perfectly finished work,” while German film director Christian Petzold describes it as “the most important movie in my life,” (Christian Petzold on A Day In The Country, Summer With ...).  Years before Gregg Toland’s infamous Deep focus camera techniques became a dominant expression in Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1940), Renoir used it to great effect in both THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937) and THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), but also here, especially in the early scenes shot from inside the rural inn, where the camera remains stationary, but a window opens and light rushes in as we see an exhilarated young woman and her mother frolicking on a tree swing, where the sudden infusion of life and nature echoes throughout the film.