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After the al fresco hallucinations of La Fille de l'eau come the severities of Zola's interiors, the other side of Jean Renoir's theater. The opening reverses Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden, the eponymous coquette (Catherine Hessling) ascends a staircase and is lowered by rope before an audience, her feet don't quite touch the ground. The femme fatale as marionette-mermaid, on stage she can't play noblewomen so she instead collects noblemen, on goes the journey from "La Blonde Venus" to petite duchesse to doomed courtesan. Admirers come and go, smitten and withered. Count Muffat (Werner Krauss) stands backstage next to suits of armor, in the boudoir in full military regalia he's a puppy lolling at her feet. Disgraced at the racetrack, Count Vandoeuvres (Jean Angelo) is consumed in a bonfire alongside the horse named after his object of desire. Meanwhile, the lovelorn nephew (Raymond Guérin-Catelain) constructs a facsimile by piling up perfume dresses on a chair and wields a pair of scissors like a dagger. "Is Madame decent?" "Isn't an honorable woman always decent?" This is the Renoir who watched Foolish Wives a dozen times, his vamps and fools rattle and spiral in the void of Claude Autant-Lara's ornate sets. The seeds of Madame Bovary and Diary of a Chambermaid and Elena et les Hommes, plus early glimpses of Citizen Kane, Le Plaisir and Viridiana. The anchor is Hessling's monstrous and affecting "gilded fly," a lipsticked slash atop a slanted torso, a comet kicking a defiant can-can before burning itself out. The camera dollies in for a shivering last view, lights out. "How can people see Renoir as a singer of the happy life when he was one of the few filmmakers capable of finishing off someone with a tracking shot?" (Serge Daney) With Pierre Lestringuez, Jacqueline Forzane, Pierre Champagne, and Valeska Gert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |