Jean Renoir | La Grande Illusion
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Renoir's films have a series of common settings. Many take place at home. These include everything from the lavish country house of La Règle du jeu, to the poverty stricken dwellings of Toni. Even in the prison camp of La Grande Illusion, we are in a castle, not a traditional prison, and spend much time in Von Rauffenstein's home-like quarters. Nearby the house there are large outdoor grounds, often the yards of the house, but also the public park of Boudu and the dunes of Woman on the Beach. Finally, there is a large water area, usually with a bank along which the characters can walk, such as the rivers of Boudu and The River. There is much domestic activity in the homes, often performed by a mother, such as the one in The River, or a mother figure, such as Irene Ryan and her sewing machine in Woman on the Beach. Meals are common. So are shots of the characters sleeping. These sleep shots tend to lead either to nightmares or to death (The River). Another popular Renoir setting: dances. These are social gatherings involving dancing, and there is much romantic mixing. Renoir also loves dance scenes performed by professionals, such as in French Cancan. Renoir also likes festivals, such as Dinali in The River. Party like games are also featured, such as the boules in Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir.
There are often brief, documentary shots of work areas, such as the woodworking shop in Beach, or the jute mill in The River. These tend to be workshop like areas, with lots of machines, and plant objects being processed (wood, jute). Otherwise, there is never much emphasis on work, except for the theater people of Renoir's 50's films. We usually see people in their leisure hours. No one seems to have any public life at all. Another exception: agricultural laborers in The Southerner and Toni.
Renoir characters are often men injured mentally or physically by war. There is Von Rauffenstein's injured flyer in La Grande Illusion, Robert Ryan's tormented Lieutenant in The Woman on the Beach, and the amputee Captain John in The River. Despite all their problems, these men tend to survive to the end of the films, and come to an adequate although rarely truly happy end.
Both The Woman on the Beach and The River contain elaborate fantasy sequences: the nightmare in the former film, and the mythological story in the latter. In both, daily life gets superimposed on fantastic situations. These bursts of fantasy are notable in a director famed for his realism.
People change their clothes in Renoir, to signify a change of role. His male characters are often switching their uniforms around. His female characters signal radical changes in their life style by altering their clothes. One thinks of the Anglo-Indian woman in The River, who goes from Western to Indian dress, and the fiancee in Beach, who switches from men's work clothes to a traditionally feminine party dress.
Renoir's films often take place at a time of flux for his characters. They are in a period of complete indecisiveness, often oscillating between various romantic and professional alternatives. Nothing is settled. This is the opposite of many filmmakers, who show their people at times of key decisions and absolute climaxes. Renoir's characters are often deeply confused about their place in the world. They are not alienated outsiders, but neither do they understand how they belong. Their minds are often in a deep quandary.
Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) seems influenced by Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933), an anti-war film based on a play by Noël Coward. There are similar scenes in both films, of a stage musical interrupted with war time news. In both films, a serious man walks right out on stage, during a frivolous musical number. He interrupts the show with news that the country has won a victory in war time. The audience and the cast both immediately abandon the musical, under the man's leadership, and instead fervently sing a patriotic song. Both films have had previous scenes, establishing the audience's interest in an on going battle that had not been going well. In Cavalcade, it is a siege of a town in the Boer War. In La Grande Illusion, it was a town that had been previously lost to the Germans during World War I. In both films, there are ironical hints that neither event is all that important in the big scheme of things, that patriotic fever has swelled interest in a war time turn of events far beyond their real significance. In both films, the musical that is interrupted is frivolous to the point of distaste. In Cavalcade, it is a singularly inane British musical of an old fashioned kind. Coward has resurrected a style of antique musical, much as Sandy Wilson would later do in The Boy Friend, and has preserved it almost as a historical specimen. In Renoir's film, it is a drag show at a prisoner of war camp. In both films, the man who interrupts the show does it with obvious relief, both personally, and to the writer's relief as well. One can feel the distaste that ostentatiously virile Jean Gabin feels for the drag show going on around him. He is clearly glad to lead the audience out of such upper class decadence and into patriotism. However, it is not clear if he has led the audience out of the frying pan and into the fire. Coward's scene is even more openly ironical. He is trying to show the cheap patriotism of the turn of the Century British, a patriotism that would later lead them into the horrors of World War I. If the musical is inane, the war fever with which it is replaced is targeted by him as the prime evil of the 20th Century, a dreadful force that will lead to its mass destruction. Both writers make it easy for the viewer of the film to identify with the emotions of the characters. A viewer of Coward's play can not help but be relieved that the awful musical number has come to and end, and be swept up into something more "meaningful" and serious. Coward intends this ironically, as an object lesson in how war time fever can be constructed and manipulated by society. His hope is plainly to inoculate the viewer against such scenes in the future: that the next time the viewer is present at such a manipulative patriotic display, that he will remember Coward's drama, and feel some emotional and intellectual resistance to what is being shown him and offered him. It is a similar effect to that offered by James L. Brooks' Broadcast News (1987): a piece of ammunition that makes the world look different after it is seen. It is hard to look at a network newscast the same way, after seeing Brook's exposé. One can see lines being fed to empty minded anchors, just as in Brooks' drama. Similarly, Coward is hoping that people will understand - and resist - the mechanism underlying patriotic displays.
Renoir's film recalls Cavalcade in other ways. Both films involve a look at multiple classes of society. Coward's play looks at both the British upper classes, and a working class family that partly works as their servants. In Coward, as in Renoir, the two classes are drawn together by their service in the Army, giving them an association they would otherwise not have had in their strictly separated civilian lives.
The superb montage showing the countryside and train stations does for Alsace what the exterior shots do for the South of France in Toni (1934). Renoir has a wonderful compositional style.