Specifically, the Ganges

Normal life can occur in extraordinary circumstances. Jean Renoir's 1951 film The River is an extraordinarily beautiful film about three different girls coming of age. The title works as the metaphor you probably suspect it does but its simplicity comes off as a lack of pretension in this lovely, simple-hearted film.

Based on a book by Rumer Godden (author of Black Narcissus) it seems to be a loosely autobiographical tale of her time growing up in British colonial India. Her stand-in character is Harriet (Patricia Walters), who dreams of being a writer. Her friends are a spoiled, pretty English girl named Valerie (Adrienne Corri), and a half Indian girl named Melanie (Radha Burnier).

Harriet is not pretty, an important part of the plot, which made me feel a little bad for actress Patricia Walters. She's not ugly, she kind of looks like Juliette Lewis. But we really do need stories that deal with issues like this which, of course, are fundamental to the lives of young people. Some people are prettier than others.

This becomes important when all three girls fall in love with a visiting American soldier called Captain John (Thomas E. Breen). John's dealing with his own sense of inadequacy because he lost a leg in the war. He has a false leg and really does not move like someone missing a leg, I must say.

Falling in love with John means something different to each of the three girls. Valerie is older than Harriet and more of a woman while for Melanie the experience is tied up in her confused cultural identity. In narration, Harriet explains that for an Indian, falling in love is a more serious thing, that it's for life, and yet, ultimately, it seems as much an intense phase of youth for Melanie as it is for the other two.

The movie's colour cinematography is about as beautiful as Powell and Pressburger's adaptation of Black Narcissus. The film adopts a drowsy tone and incorporates the lives of other members of the family, coming to resemble other films about families from the perspectives of young female characters at the time, such as Meet Me in Saint Louis or even Shadow of a Doubt. There's something very cosy about it.

It was shot entirely in India and Renoir's assistant director was Satyajit Ray. So there's a sense of authenticity pretty rare for Western movies about India of the time.

The River is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Length of an Escape Tunnel

The logic of war tends to break down on the personal level. 1937's La Grande Illusion uses a German prisoner of war camp to illustrate this. It doesn't find it necessary to make some direct, impassioned argument about how all these people have their humanity in common, it seems to just let events play out along the natural lines of human sympathy. So it's quite subtle and lovely.

A lot of credit has to go to Jean Gabin. Although it's really an ensemble film, Gabin plays the closest thing the film has to a central lead, a French lieutenant called Marechal. His charisma makes him a focal point even when he isn't framed that way in a scene.

He has a sense of honour and decency but he's not a hero or a paragon. The film resists making any of its characters too pure. One of the central relationships of the film is between the prison commandant, Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), and a captured French aristocrat, Boeldieu (Pierre Fresney). Rauffenstein, also an aristocrat, feels an immediate kinship with his French counterpart. In his courteous treatment of the prisoners and of Boeldieu in particular he expresses a belief that war is antithetical to the polite society of the ancient European ruling class. The camaraderie between some of the German prison guards and the prisoners shows a discord between the war and the lower classes as well. The motivation for war is almost totally invisible. One prisoner remarks on how he hates how the German newspapers exaggerate events in the war to which Marechal points out the French papers do the same.

The movie's set in World War I, a particularly useful war for this story as the motivations behind it are infamously vague and complicated contrasted with the real, visceral suffering endured by millions of people.

Marechal eventually plans an escape with a Jewish inmate called Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a character whom director Jean Renoir evidently included to argue against the rising antisemitism in Europe at the time. One wonders if Renoir could have made such a film about World War II in which war crimes made the purpose of military engagement much clearer. Though, of course, in Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, he eloquently explored the differences in how that war came about.

Le Grande Illusion is available on The Criterion Channel.

Doctor Cordelier and Mister Opale

However thin the line may be between tragedy and comedy, blurring the line is a tricky feat only the best artists may successfully accomplish. Such an artist was Jean Renoir whose 1959 adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, is among the most experimental and yet faithful ever made. As he did with Rules of the Game, Renoir uses the language of cinematic comedy to make a bold and disturbingly insightful statement on human nature.

Renoir casts Jean-Louis Barrault, an actor as well as a mime, as his Jekyll/Hyde, here called Cordelier/Opale. Opale is a remarkable take on the character--he does all of the horrible things Hyde does in the story, including trampling a child and murdering a man in the street, but Renoir takes one point of description in the novella to an interesting comedic conclusion--Hyde is much smaller than Jekyll so his clothes don't fit him properly. So Opale, sauntering down the street twirling his cane, presents an oddly cute, Chaplin-esque figure.

This is augmented further by a xylophone in the score hitting a melody with high notes. The mayhem he causes really seems to be the product of a mean little boy let loose.

As in I, Monster, this film makes explicit the connexions with psychotherapy. The austere and cadaverous Cordelier is a psychotherapist--Barrault's portrayal of him is every bit as effective in its stiffness as his portrayal of Opale is in its looseness and silliness. The film has an Utterson character named Joly (Teddy Bilis) whose role is mainly significant in his function as Cordelier's lawyer as the title draws attention to Cordelier's will. As in the novella, Joly/Utterson is concerned about Cordelier/Jekyll leaving everything to the strange and sinister Hyde/Opale. But in terms of providing a contrary perspective to Cordelier's desire to purify himself the film establishes this more in its version of Lanyon, here another psychotherapist named Severin (Michel Vitold).

In contrast to Cordelier's meticulous appearance, Severin always has a loosened tie and seems generally dishevelled, though not nearly as messy as Opale. Severin freely flirts with his secretary while Cordelier rigorously condemns himself for being being tempted by his own secretary, Lise (Claudie Bourlon), when she flirts with him. In one of the film's most fascinating scenes, Cordelier talks about female patients who tried to flirt with him, something he would never give into, but he eventually rapes one such patient when she's unconscious. Even though she clearly wanted a relationship with him, he's worried that she would gossip, so therefore molesting her without her knowledge is preferable to him. This, in a nutshell, perfectly captures the character of Jekyll and how he was interpreted by both John Barrymore and Christopher Lee but Barrault makes the doctor even more disgustingly pathetic. Jekyll falsely interprets the dichotomy between Jekyll and Hyde as good and evil. The reality is a distinction between the image of respectability and the licence of anonymity. Cordelier is just as ready to take advantage of an unconscious woman as Opale is ready to abuse his anonymity.

When he first steps out as Opale and has his first encounter with another human being--as it happens, an innocuous conversation with a mailman--Cordelier remarks in voice over how it's here that Opale comes into existence as an independent being. His existence is defined in being seen by others and this is entirely Cordelier's conception of existence.

Monstrous things are simultaneously ridiculous. As people gather later in Cordelier's home and panic increases at the knowledge that Opale is on the loose, one young woman, without thinking, won't even open the door for Joly, even though she knows its him. This and other scenes are performed with the energy of a screwball comedy but somehow it doesn't trivialise the issues it's dealing with. Rather, it serves to show how ridiculous human beings can be even when they're committing terrible crimes.

Incredibly, this film was made for television, but you wouldn't know it from Renoir's compositions, the high energy in the comedic scenes, and the level of thought that clearly went into the screenplay.

The Precarious Noise

Saying just the right thing at just the right time can be dangerous. This is likely why Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), was met with disgust at the time of its release despite on the surface being a relatively harmless drawing room comedy. But there are ways in which the film is definitely more like a nightmare about a comedy than a straightforward comedy, despite Renoir's expressed intention only to make the latter. The delirium of comedy becomes a foundation layer for a truly disturbing portrait of Europe at the beginning of World War II.

The film begins with a pilot, Andre (Roland Toutain), landing his plane in France after an historic flight that one of the reporters present compares to Charles Lindbergh. All Andre seems concerned with, though, is that the woman he loves, Christine (Nora Gregor), isn't there to meet him. Continually the film presents its ensemble of aristocratic characters ignoring or barely noticing vitally important, even dangerous things, focusing instead on their own romances--affairs which seem quite capricious despite the passion characters express for them.

Most of the film is set at the enormous country house belonging to Robert (Marcel Dalio), Christine's husband. It seems like a long, unbroken party sequence. Much of the dialogue was apparently improvised and characters chat endlessly about their relationships and consider the pros and cons of starting an affair with this person or breaking off an affair with that person. Octave, a character played by Renoir himself, has some slightly more profound things to say, including one really impressive, ominous line; "in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons." But this is tossed off as something barely less trivial than everything else that's going on.

Because of the high turnover rate in romance, grand sentiments become commonplace, so maybe that's why extraordinary things don't seem to make much of an impression. One scene that is truly nightmarish in its comic energy has the German gamekeeper, Schumacher (Gaston Madot), running rampant through the party firing a gun, trying to hit the poacher, Marceau (Julien Carette), he'd caught with his wife. Everyone seems frightened and shocked but also delighted and amused in equal measure. The recorded music playing from a machine gets stuck and the discordant sound alters the tone of the slapstick considerably.

Schumacher might be taken as representing Hitler--he has something of the self-importance and resentment for the people around him one associates with Hitler. Marceau might be interpreted as a Jew, especially when he tries to blend into a crowd of partygoers as Schumacher fires at him. This interpretation doesn't quite hold when he and Schumacher are commiserating later when it seems to them Lisette (Paulette Dubost), Schumacher's wife, has transferred her affections to Octave. On the other hand, this speaks to the ultimate shallowness of the anti-Semitism which operated as a convenient outlet for anger and resentment. The terrifying absurdity is in how thin and insubstantial are the philosophies used to justify terrible destruction.

One should also note that Marceau making out with another man's wife is exactly what everyone else is doing. Andre and Robert finally come to blows over Christine; Christine finally realises she's always been in love with one man before finally realising she's always been in love with another. Revelations that one couple is cheating seem to have significance only in how passionate one can reasonably be about it, or charmingly dispassionate. When one woman finally admits to loving the man who'd pursued her, he checks her ardour by reminding her "There are rules, after all." And one does get that impression, that everyone, however chaotic their outward behaviour, is still operating within unseen boundaries. They're so strong that when one man commits murder, everyone instinctively considers it the appropriate response when he's allowed to help clean up some of the wreckage and resume his position in society.