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City Lights is the point of departure, winnowed to the image of "a perfect tramp" not quite domesticated in his savior's abode. The bourgeois bookseller (Charles Granval) is an amiable ninny, enjoying an affair with the maid (Sévérine Lerczinska) and, in an expansive mood, giving away Voltaire's Les lettres d'Amabed to a young student. He fancies himself a satyr, the real one turns up in the Seine, Boudu le clochard (Michel Simon) disconsolate after losing his mutt. "You're not bringing that into my house!" The lost Marx brother, the French one, scraggly and horny and blithely ungrateful, digging his fingers into sardine cans and wiping his shoes on the satin bedspread. A beautiful mangy-daredevil turn by Simon, dangling from a doorframe so he can hug the ingénue with his legs and using his sublime rasp to imitate the disapproving singsong of the lady of the house (Marcelle Hainia). The last straw, spitting on Balzac's Physiologie du mariage. "One should only come to the aid of one's equals." A freshness unheard-of, sustained by Jean Renoir with a camera that expands space to accommodate the fancies and revelations of characters and performers. (Deep-focus, telescope lenses, documentary views of the Bois de Boulogne and the Pont des Arts, it's all at his fingertips.) Pipes of Pan and honking cars, triumphant trumpets for the guest's romp with the missus. The animal urge may be shaved and dressed in tuxedo and bowler hat, but it will still impulsively reach out for a water lily and capsize the canoe of middle-class respectability. "Un troglodyte," happy with a scarecrow's rags, celebrated with a 360° whirl and a chanson. Buñuel in Viridiana considers "the good deed not wasted," and down the line is Carax's Merde. With Jean Gehret, Max Dalban, and Jean Dasté. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |