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)

Love On the Run (L'amour en fuite)

LOVE ON THE RUN (L'amour en fuite)     B             

France  (94 mi)  1979  d:  François Truffaut

Caresses photographed on my sensitive skin
You can dump ’m all, moments, pictures, what you will
There’s always transparent adhesive tape
To square all those torments back into shape

We were that splendid shot: the smart lovers
We set up home, happiness for two, yeah right
Soon enough shards cut and gash and blood spurts
There goes the crockery on the tiled floor

[Chorus]
We, we, we didn’t make it
Peewee, tears down your cheek
We part and there’s nothing we can explain
It’s love on the run
Love on the run

I slept, a child came up in lace frills
Away, then back, then shifty, that’s the swallows’ drill
Hardly have I moved in I leave the two-room flat
Whatever your name is, Lily, Clare or Brad

All my life is a running after things that won’t stay put
Sweet-scented girls, roses, posies of tears
My mother also put behind her ear
A drop of something that smelled just the same

—Alain Souchon, L'Amour en fuite (Love On the Run), L'amour En Fuite （Love On The Run) - L'amour En Fuite - YouTube (3:33)

In the concluding episode of the 5-film Antoine Doinel series, very much a complexly conceived, character driven saga that immerses you in the character’s fleeting thoughts and memories, what’s immediately apparent is the use of flashback sequences, which, with few exceptions, are little more than edited footage from the earlier films, while adding a new thread that combines several of the characters.  While all the other films play perfectly well when viewed alone, as these were never originally planned as a series, this is the only one that deliberately contains the connecting threads of the four previous films.  If separated over time, as these films were made in an era prior to DVD videos, where the only way you could see these films was in theatrical screenings that would likely be spread out over time, and not necessarily in order, where you literally live with the characters in your head for years, so the audience probably appreciated the effort made by the director to combine elements of all the previous stories, bringing the viewer up to date on the latest developments of Antoine Doinel’s storied life.  But if viewed in succession, very much in tune with the modern approach, this feels like an unnecessary recap of events, heavy on the recurring film clips, nearly twenty minutes in a 94-minute film, which only feel redundant.  Outside of the heartbreakingly fierce originality of Jean-Pierre Léaud’ s child performance in the original The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), one of the single most compelling characters of the entire series has always been the assured maturity and remarkable independence of Marie-France Pisier as Colette in Antoine and Colette (1962).  By now a co-writer with director Jacques Rivette of Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont ... (1974), one of the most uniquely creative films ever made, Pisier is also a co-writer and featured star of this film as well, albeit 17-years later.  It’s interesting that she has aged in parallel fashion alongside Antoine and has become a respectable lawyer.  What Pisier has always brought to the table was a dominating personality, where she’s actually been more interesting to watch than the rather feeble exploits of Antoine, who since the rebellious first film has largely drifted through his life as a dawdler and a daydreamer.       

It would be fair to say that the earliest first three films through Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés) (1968) represent the most intensely autobiographical period, where the predominate themes explored are a result of Truffaut’s own dysfunctional family experience, where his missing father and indifferent mother gave him the impetus to revolt from authority and run away from the trouble that always seemed to follow, where he never seems capable of taking responsibility or sustaining a committed and loving relationship.  Oscillating between elation and despair, he continues to idealize women, most likely something that developed from his voracious reading habits as a child, where the lack of role models in his own life, getting expelled from several schools, furthering his social isolation, and the need for both his missing mother and the woman of his dreams left him most desperately in need of being loved, where often the only place he could find worthy representatives was conjuring up images in his imagination from the works of fiction that he read.  It is this sense of rebellious outsiderism that most interests us about the young Antoine, a young man who has difficulty finding his place in the world, who lacks the social graces, whose youthful exuberance makes him wildly excited about an idea only to forget about it a short time later, whose loneliness is so deeply etched in his personality that he becomes an actor in public continually guarding his inner feelings, often expressed through a clownish humor, where Jean-Pierre Léaud is perfectly emblematic of that restless cauldron of anxiety assigned to protect his deepest unrest, where in his mind he always sees a way for everything to work out perfectly, but when confronted face to face with reality, his mind works simultaneously in forward and reverse, having difficulty with the present, as he’s a poor substitute for what he had in mind, often making a fool of himself with aggressively inappropriate behavior, driving away the very thing he’d hoped would offer him salvation.  In place of the real love he hungers for, he becomes something of an emotional thief, thriving on the affections of others, ingeniously creating circumstances of momentary bliss, stealing kisses, quick sexual excursions, forgotten promises of love in the night, and any other means to attract attention, either the good kind or the bad kind, where he would forever remain important and significant, and most of all alive.    

 

Once Antoine gets involved in a marriage with Christine (Claude Jade) in Bed & Board (Domicile conjugal) (1970), a woman Truffaut actually fell in love with and even got engaged, but never married, she is portrayed in the series as a virtuous girl that remained a virgin up until her marriage, but can’t put up with Antoine’s practice of deceit and philandering ways, yet she still loves him and demonstrates saintly patience (as projected by Truffaut), even as she can’t live with him anymore.  Five years after their marriage, now in his thirties, they are finally getting a divorce, where sitting outside the judge’s chambers both of them flash back to earlier moments in their relationship, where often one can’t tell what the other is thinking, but the audience is fully aware.  In this way, it allows us to see not only Antoine’s reflections, but also those of his young loves as they work their way through adolescence.  Antoine also has a new love, Sabine (Dorothee, a French TV personality), who we see in the opening scene, a bright and optimistic spirit that works as a clerk in a record store, who doesn’t put up with Antoine’s dour and melancholy mood swings, as she has a constantly sunny disposition, effecting the outcome of the second book he’s writing:  “Because of you, I’ve changed my ending.  No suicide, the hero opts to live.”  She wants Antoine to move in with her, but he won’t even keep a razor at her place.  As a character (Pisier) later observes, “Same old Doinel.”  His situation is exacerbated by a chance meeting with Colette, where he immediately swoons at the opportunity to meet with her again, where she’s been reading his book, Les Salades de L'amour (Love and Other Problems), but once again, as before, she sets him straight, rejecting an impulsive kiss, reminding him that “It takes two to kiss!” and that he’s learned nothing, as relationships are more than “disappointments, arguments, and break ups,” telling him “You have a strange concept of relationships, all you care about is boy meets girl.  Once they’re a couple, for you it’s all downhill.”  In this final film, Antoine has never been more impatient and ill-tempered, always in a foul mood, spending his time whining and complaining about what a hurry he’s in and has no patience for anyone else, where all he really thinks about is himself.

Doinel is always on the run, always late, always a man in a hurry; the notion of flight is to be understood in every possible sense: time flying, always being projected into the future, always anxious (never content!), never calm, and also love flying out the window. . . also flight in movement; however much you try to flee from your problems they're always right behind you, pursuing you, etc.

—François Truffaut, in a letter to popular singer Alain Souchon, who sings the film's title song 

But we learn the backdrop of how he met Sabine, finding a ripped up photograph of her left behind in a telephone booth, vowing to find her and love her forever, like a hunt for a treasure chest, or the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.  Besides the interesting side story of meeting Colette, where even 17-years later, Marie-France Pisier continues to dance circles around a continually befuddled Jean-Pierre Léaud, Antoine incredibly experiences a visit from Monsieur Lucien (Julien Bertheau), like an apparition from the past, last seen kissing his mother on the street (by a different actor, Jean Douchet) when he was only 14, becoming perhaps the only character other than Antoine to appear in both the first and last episodes outside of flashback sequences.  As her most devout lover, Lucien adds fertile territory, including pertinent background perspective about his mother, where perhaps the most shocking detail in the entire 5-film series is claiming “She had a strange way of showing it, but she loved you.”  This, of course, puts everything that came before in a different light, where Lucien gently reminds Antoine that though his parents were imperfect, “the faults were not entirely theirs,” suggesting many of his problems are his own.  Just after his mother’s death, Truffaut discovered numerous documents in her archives that displayed an unspoken affection for her son, where in his biography, he reproached himself later in life for his resentment toward his mother, where one of the transcendent moments of the film is Lucien taking Antoine to visit her grave at the Montmartre Cemetery, one of her favorite neighborhoods.  Like the reconstructed torn up photograph, the entire Doinel adventure is an elaborate memory puzzle that needs to be fit together, where Antoine’s journey is a quest to find the proper balance in his life or be destined to always fall over the edge.  We’re left with the idea that once he finally accepts his mother’s love, though she never really accepted him, Antoine can stop running.

Truffaut was 46 when he made this film, and died just six years later, a year after his youngest child was born, making only three more films, slowed down by health problems that resulted in a stroke, eventually diagnosed with a brain tumor, where he died in 1984 at the age of 52, five films short of his goal to make 30 films and then retire, (along with his other personal goal of watching 3 movies a day and reading two books a week), hoping to write books in his waning years.  He is buried at the Montmartre Cemetery, one of Antoine’s favorite neighborhoods.  

George Sadoul, noted French journalist and film critic, writing in 1959 on the revolutionary aspects of The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), which may as well stand for the entire Antoine Doinel series:

There is neither a ‘happy ending’ nor an ‘unhappy ending.’ It’s an ‘open end’ with a question mark. It’s just fine that way…this story flows along like life.