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)

César and Rosalie (César et Rosalie)

 

Director Claude Sautet

Sautet with Romy Schneider

CÉSAR AND ROSALIE (César et Rosalie)             B+                                                           France  Italy  Germany  (104 mi)  1972  d: Claude Sautet

With thanks to the monumental achievement of Bertrand Tavernier’s Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français) (2016), an exhaustive re-examination of French cinema, the considerable talents of Claude Sautet came to light.  Passionate about the fine arts as a child, he made sculptures before moving on to painting film sets.  Working as a social worker after the war, he joined the Communist Party for a few years before shifting his interest to music, writing for the left-wing journal Combat as a music critic.  His experience watching Marcel Carné’s LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939) left a profound impression, convincing him to pursue a career in filmmaking, making a short film NOUS N’IRONS PLUS AU BOIS in 1951 before spending the next decade working as an assistant for several directors before making perhaps his best known film, Classe Tous Risques (The Big Risk) (1960), which was released nearly simultaneously with Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960), both starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and was completely overlooked with the explosion of the French New Wave, with critics typically viewing his film as passé.  Unable to direct another, as no producers were interested, it would be another decade before his own career took off, so he continued to work behind the scenes with Marcel Ophüls, Jacques Deray, and Jean Becker, among others, transforming scripts by bringing more life into them, described by Truffaut as a “script doctor.”  Heralded by the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, and Pauline Kael, Sautet’s films were a constant fixture in arthouse theaters during the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, yet were largely derided and misunderstood, as he remains curiously absent from most discussions of major postwar French filmmakers.  His films defy easy categorization, known for their psychological acuity, yet he was a contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague without being part of it.  But LA CHOSES DE LA VIE (1970) marked a turning point in his career, with Austrian-born actress Romy Schneider making the difference with her magnetic presence and completely unpretentious beauty, making a series of five films together within the decade, where Rosalie is one of the great female characters in contemporary film, coming very close to her own personality, acknowledging that Sautet was her favorite director to work with, having also worked with Visconti, Welles, and Preminger, yet according to his wife Graziella Sautet, before he met her, “He didn’t know how to direct actresses and female characters didn’t interest him so much, except as objects.”  While Schneider died under mysterious circumstances at the tender age of 43, their films together are a way of preserving her memory in cinema immortality.  Sautet frequently collaborated with actors Michel Piccoli (5 films) and Yves Montand (3 films), screenwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie (6 films), cinematographer Jean Boffety (6 films), editor Jacqueline Thiédot (12 films), and composer Phillipe Sarde (10 films), all of whom figure prominently in this visually sunny film.  Sautet is best-known for his intelligent, richly textured characterization of the French middle class, where personal lives are contextualized in a particular culture, time, and place, an expression of France as a liberal democracy, where freedoms are often challenged within the complexity of existing relationships in a changing society.  In an interview for the book Mythos Romy Schneider, Claude Sautet said in 1998, “I think that Romy had something in her charisma that swept over other actors or colleagues and which was not particularly comfortable for her.  Montand and she, that was war.  Montand was macho and that still had a very appealing effect on the shooting, because she tamed him like a puppy.”  

Sautet has elaborated on the romantic ménage-à-trois themes of Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962), with Schneider as Rosalie inheriting the Jeanne Moreau role (originally written years earlier for Catherine Deneuve), expressing a casual nonchalance, yet her openness and fiery independence sets her apart from both men who desire her, preferring instead to control her, which was part of the changing social milieu of the 70’s.  Schneider’s enigmatic performance is utterly enchanting, a confident and determined woman, relaxed and comfortable in her own skin, where she appears perfectly happy in her relationship with César, Yves Montand, one of the indelible faces in French cinema and a force in Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1953), a wealthy industrialist with a family-owned scrap iron business, where he’s a blustery, cigar-chomping, larger-than-life figure guided by his own impulses, throwing money around with ease, used to having his way, always demanding to be the center of attention, where their seemingly idyllic existence is uprooted by the sudden appearance of an old flame.  David, Sami Frey, who dances the Madison with Anna Karina in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), is an art designer and comic illustrator who turns up out of nowhere after an absence of five years, having left for America after Rosalie chose one of his friends over him, a painter named Antoine (Umberto Orsini) that she has since divorced, immediately declaring his love, as the two men vie for her affections, putting César in a precarious position.  A common theme throughout Sautet’s career is the midlife crisis, especially as it pertains to men in the middle of their comfortable bourgeois lives, with the director avoiding all frills, where the focus is always on the story itself, deriving a genuine quality from social realism, where his written dialogue is unprecedented in its authenticity.  Almost immediately things start going awry, where the fragility of the relationship is exposed, as the comforts of middle class stability are a distant memory, with César shaken to the core, though he tries to shake it off and pretend he’s unfazed, with that perpetual smile on his face, like he’s the life of the party, César et Rosalie - "C'est mon Bach" YouTube (22 seconds), but it’s clear he’s caught off-balance and emotionally flummoxed, fearing the rival love from a much younger love interest, where the surface belies his internal anguish.  The two men are polar opposites, with Montand displaying the full range of emotions as an extroverted ham, über macho and aggressive, with a fiery and possessive temperament, while the introverted David is a sensitive free spirit, a brooding dreamer who is more subdued and quietly reserved.  César’s pompous braggadocio and boisterous vulgarity are considered charming during happier times, a brash style also on display during business transactions, often sending in Rosalie to smooth the deal, like a good cop/bad cop routine.  While she has been dividing her time between her mother’s house, with her siblings, and César, his tender affection for her is indisputable, yet his abrupt, violently off-putting behavior sends the wrong message to Rosalie, who prefers the comforts and security of a more peaceful rapprochement, where it’s the daily living that matters, not the need to be swept off her feet, yet his jealousy has no bounds, literally sending her into the arms of David.  It’s a bit surprising how quickly the wheels come off the rails in this model romance, suggesting middle class stability is a mirage, with so much of it about keeping up appearances, where it only survives during good times, but can’t stand up to the test of turbulence, which challenges the very foundation of bourgeois existence.  The recent Claire Denis film Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) (2022) feels like a modernized version of the Sautet film with more explosive fireworks.   

Lacking the biting sarcasm of Buñuel, the theatrical introspection of Rivette, or the dark Hitchcockian humor of Chabrol, Sautet’s sophisticated yet meticulously crafted character studies dissect societal ills with the precision of Chekhovian short stories, accentuated by stylishly appealing performances that seductively enhance viewer interest.  Romance in this French love drama does not unfold in sexual liaisons, but in intimate conversations over morning coffee by an open garden window.  Rosalie may be an idealized French view of a liberated woman, the personification of the modern woman, dressed in Yves Saint Laurent, refusing to consider marriage, while at times intimately connected to each man, enticed by the alluring charms by both, free to go back and forth between them, abandoning herself to her inclinations of the moment, capturing the essence of the “love the one you’re with” era.  In each case she is routinely excluded from the communal male social activities, like playing poker in César’s case, where she sits alone in the background until summoned to bring more ice or beer, or sitting around a large drawing table with David and his associates, again sitting alone off to the side until summoned to bring coffee.  She has a young daughter that César adores, Catherine (Céline Galland), a product of her failed marriage, yet remains connected to her large extended family.  When the two of them disappear from his life, César is simply not the same, a shell of his former self, where he’s reduced to taking desperate measures.  As David and Rosalie run away to Sète on the Mediterranean, the site of Agnès Varda’s early film LA POINTE COURTE (1955), (Sete - The most beautiful port in Southern France), César tracks them down, surprising them unexpectedly on the beach, exactly as David did earlier in the film, creating immediate anxiety and stress in such a relaxed, beach resort atmosphere, which includes, among other things, the spectacle of a Medieval style of water jousting.  In order to appease Rosalie and win her back, he purchases the abandoned family summer home on the island of Noirmoutier in the Atlantic, a fisherman’s paradise, (Noirmoutier, my desert island paradise in the Vendée), which has always been one of her dreams.  Exhibiting typical male behavior, after making a damn fool of himself, he thinks he can buy his way out of the problem, yet money can’t buy happiness, with Rosalie and her entire family deciding to spend the summer there, but she is pining away in loneliness, distraught and emotionally vacant.  In an effort to rally her deflated spirits, César enlists the aid of David, persuading him to visit after arriving at the conclusion that he can’t contend with the power him living in her “imagination,” a well-intentioned ploy with mixed results, as both men surprisingly spend more time together on a fishing boat at sea and actually become good friends.  There is a spirit of melancholy in Sautet’s films, infused with a literary intelligence, with a pervasive feeling of loneliness and sadness.  Many of Sautet’s films contain a recurring visual motif, integrating the background and foreground through windows or glass reflections, examined by TroisCouleurs in this visual analysis, 8 - Claude Sautet - Reflets intimes // Intimate Reflections - Vimeo (2:00).  An expert eye will find Isabelle Huppert as a kid sister in just the third appearance in her career, with an ambigious finale poetically narrated by Michel Piccoli, as Rosalie returns after a prolonged absence away from both of them, where it’s clear she is the engine that drives this train, as the game of musical chairs begins again, "on ne peut pas se quitter sans se le dire" extrait de César et Rosalie de Claude Sautet YouTube (3:42).