Jean Renoir's The River – Reviews #238

A few thoughts on a fascinating film.



The River (Jean Renoir, 1951) – Shot entirely on location in India, this was Renoir's first film in colour and his favourite of his works; Scorsese called it, along with the The Red Shoes, "the most beautiful colour film ever made". Its making launched Satyajit Ray on his career, author Rumer Godden preferred it to the celebrated screen version of another of her stories – Black Narcissus – and it was the primary influence on Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, which lifted liberally from The River.

For all of those reasons, and having seen a couple of clips from the movie, I’d wanted to see it for years. And it's nearly great, even partly great, with its passages of visual poetry, its affecting vignettes, its painterly approach – as close as the director ever came to homaging his father, the great impressionist painter, Auguste. But it falls frustratingly short of consistent and total greatness, and I think that’s because of Renoir's standing at the time.


Patricia Walters (left) severely out of her depth in Renoir's exquisite film.

Sacked by RKO and out of favour in France (who saw his taking of American citizenship as a betrayal), he couldn't afford to bring first choice Marlon Brando out to play Captain John – the one-legged soldier who inflames the passions of three very different adolescents – and so this pivotal role was played by Thomas E. Breen, who could draw on his real-life experiences to play the part, having lost a leg in the war, but was unfortunately crap. The central character was also handed to a non-professional, Patricia Walters, whose realisation of the bookish innocent, Harriet, is stilted to the point of acute embarrassment. Everybody's.


Burnier's extraordinary dance sequence.

There's so much here that's staggeringly impressive, from Claude Renoir's vivid three-strip cinematography to the heartfelt, nuanced supporting performances from Nora Swinburne (as Harriet's mother) and Radha Burnier (playing the mixed-race teenager Melanie, singularly uncomfortable in her position between worlds), and a succession of outrageously impressive artistic decisions. That includes a fantastic, fantastical story-within-a-film featuring Burnier as a dancing goddess, Renoir's limited equipment (no dollies) forcing her to provide the shifting perspective in a way that makes it much more interesting and exciting.

Elsewhere, he presents a glorious montage of riverlife focusing on the multitude of banks of steps leading down to the water, while the director's decision to incorporate passages of rich Godden prose is an inspired one, with June Hillman's lyrical delivery enhancing the film's steady, backwards-looking mythos, charged with romance, poignancy and pain. Godden, who despised the studio-bound artificiality of Powell and Pressburger's erotic adaptation of Black Narcissus, was heavily involved on set, scripting, advising on shots and even incorporating a new character, Melanie, whose initial fate was dismissed by the observing Ray as "unrealistic and sentimental" and so junked. His involvement with the film was actually less than often suggested, though - he had no official role and only attended the set on weekends (due to a day job in advertising), and when he finally saw the finished film more than 15 years later, he declared that there was very little of value, except background colour and a climactic scene concerning Harriet. (Certainly there are many who've lambasted the film for presenting a 'colonial' view of India but, y'know, India was a colony and the book is based on a story by an Englishwoman who lived there, so...)


Adrienne Corri as the cruel, insecure Valerie.

I'm in a big Renoir phase at the moment. I feel a great personal connection to his films, particularly the understated humanity he captures in grace notes and vignettes, and this film's preoccupation with the loss of innocence is something that really speaks to me. The atmosphere, layered with beguiling imagery and diegetic Indian music; the gentle rhythms; the unexpected, imaginatively-devised set-pieces; the adorable little kid, Bogey; Adrienne Corri's tantalising characterisation as the cruel, flirtatious, insecure Valerie; Arthur Shields' brilliant monologue near the close (which is cut oddly short - shades of Ray Collins in Welles' butchered Ambersons); its circular ruminations on death and rebirth – The River slowly casts a spell on you.

But that spell is rudely interrupted at regular intervals by the nondescript Breen (who reminds me of abysmal Hollywood comedian Red Skelton) and the horribly miscast Walters. Either Renoir had Truffaut's problem of not being able to tell when an English-speaking actor was giving a bad performance, or he didn't have the resources to do anything about it. The film, after all, was being bankrolled by a florist. The severe problems in performance are also accompanied by a few instances of bizarrely functional staging amidst the majesty, reminding me of film historian Joseph McBride's complaint that director Mervyn LeRoy, after taking over Mister Roberts from John Ford, essentially just made the cast stand in a line.



For all its brilliance, then, Renoir's favourite of his own works isn't mine, though I defy anyone not to find moments of greatness within it. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading. Two of my favourite Renoir films are reviewed elsewhere on the site: Partie de campagne (which is also in Part 1 of my all-time top 100) and French Cancan.

John Grant, French Cancan, and Making America Great Again not being that good – Reviews #242

LIVE


Pic from here.

John Grant at the Royal Albert Hall (15 June 2016) – Not the loud, sweaty, hyper-intensive show we got at Hammersmith Apollo in November, but no less memorable a night, with Grant in balladic, hypnotic and rhapsodic mood. He kicked off with a breathtakingly cathartic 'Geraldine' – “We’re not like them, we’re not that strong/At least that’s what they’ve been telling us all along – and invited Kylie on for a breathtaking, triumphant 'Glacier' duet that should perhaps have closed the show (but was merely the first of five songs in an extended encore), and in between offered a gallery of highlights drawn from each of his three stunning solo records – and then far beyond.

There was a surely definitive new arrangement of his most recent title track, 'Grey Tickles, Black Pressure', a heartstopping version of Mary MacGregor’s 'Torn Between Two Lovers' (co-written by Peter Yarrow), featuring Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon on lead vocals, and outings for just about every song of real note that he’s recorded: a blistering, euphoric 'No More Tangles' for which he knocked the lid of his sensational baritone voice, recent single 'Disappointing' – with wah-wah guitar from Richard Hawley – and an uber-cool 'Black Belt', a track that showcasing every bit of his wit, sardonism and impeccable rhythm, but never quite moved like this.

There was the simple, simply wonderful love song, Outer Space; the discordant beast of a freak-out that his near-legendary 'Queen of Denmark' has now become (like Dylan doing Hendrix’s 'All Along the Watchtower', it’s closer to Sinead O’Connor cover than Grant’s original); the timely 'Jesus Hates Faggots' – now back on his regular setlist – and of course his anthemic GMF, introduced in his typically knowing, offhand manner, which can’t quite disguise that the song is about how motherfucking great he is. Throw out the risible 'Snug Slacks' (a hymn to seeing men’s penises in their tracksuit bottoms) and bring in 'You Don’t Have To', and we’d have had something like the definitive Grant show: overwhelming ‘70s-style balladeering and challenging but danceable contemporary electronica, all apparently adapted for the venue so that it all chimed with the opulence of the arena, rather than blasting the roof off the place. On any terms, though, an incredible evening. (4)

I also met him, as we were doing some filming for a work project, look.


This is a different gig. You can't see his surprisingly muscular arms.

COMEDY: David Cross: Making America Great Again at the O2 Forum (Sun 19 June) – I’m not sure quite the point of this was: an evening of Arrested Development star David Cross telling a bunch of liberal Londoners about the evils of Donald Trump, gun ownership and Catholicism. With a big grey beard and wearing an eye-grabbing Stars-and-Stripes cap that blazed in the lights, he delivered a set that kept threatening to go somewhere important, but ultimately settled for preaching to the converted, while occasionally shocking them with rape jokes. There are a few nice bits – routines about a shop boasting of its “get what you get” tattoo, the logic behind selling suitcases in an airport, and a guy who thought the notorious phrase was “Hi Hitler” – but he doesn’t seem to have the equipment to take these somewhere painfully, breathlessly funny: too many jokes are either blindingly obvious or fall well short of where they should land.

A new bit about Jo Cox’s alleged murderer finds the essential absurdity of the name he provided in court, then uses it for a lame Starbucks gag. And more often than not he simply went for the lazy shock option, with innumerable jokes about raping or killing children. He threw in one about cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad too, perhaps to balance the scales before a prolonged routine about transubstantiation that could have been written 600 years ago, suggesting that it would be fine to get a tattoo of him if it was on a milk carton, followed by a sequence in which he tried to explain the joke whilst being murdered. It kind of summed up the evening: a provocative theme, a flash of intelligence, then a cartoonish, unsatisfying denouement. (2)



THEATRE: The Threepenny Opera (National Theatre) – By far the best thing I’ve seen at the National since coming to London: a lewd, sharp and sordid version of Brecht and Weill’s classic musical that provides deliciously amoral fun while doubling as a critique of establishment hypocrisy – and perhaps humanity itself. Rory Kinnear is Mack the Knife, the womanising career criminal whose fucking and fighting may be coming to an end after he alienates his confidantes, his lovers and his police protector, then goes to a brothel when he’s supposed to be fleeing town.

The songs, the ensemble, the post-modern staging on a revolving stage – everything works. In order for it to do so, Kinnear has both to vocalise persuasively and radiate a brusque, sensual charisma that I didn’t imagine him capable of, and he does with ease, while there’s superb work in support from Rosalie Craig, Hayden Gwynne and particularly Nick Holder as Mack’s roly-poly nemesis, Peachum, a fey, flabby, curiously refined villain in the Sydney Greenstreet/Robert Morley/Francis Sullivan mold. It’s vividly, bawdily and joyously done, and yet underneath it all there’s malevolence and malaise.

While the barbs at bankers throb with malice, and the violent misogny makes you nauseous, it’s Scene 7 that knocked me sideways. Seeing the play the day after Jo Cox’s murder, the brooding, putrid patriotism that infests the characters – sprawled beneath a gargantuan St George’s flag – cast a pall over the theatre: one of those moments when great art captures the national mood almost through chance. (4)

***

TV



Life on Mars (Series 1, 2006) – I finally caught up with this, a decade on. It’s a remarkable piece of television that plays into my own nostalgia, complicated relationship with the passing of time, and predilection for picking holes in our sincere but synthetic liberality – there’s something guiltily pleasurable about seeing a copper just thumping an apparent criminal, then alarm bells go off and you realise that you’re adrift in a moral morass and that whatever the temptation is to whack seven bells out of someone, it’s humanity, due process and a certain hand-wringing that represent the best of us, if not always the best chance of a conviction. Somewhere in my subconscious, I always think I’ll go back to a time before things went wrong. A Britain of easier choices and starker lines, of football as a working-class sport (as it was when my dad first took me in 1990), a country that looked like it did in those photo albums in the front room, from the billboards to the faces to the cars on the street.

Life on Mars pushes all those buttons, and though the dialogue sometimes slips into the obvious or the cartoonish, the programme’s essential eerieness, its dislocating iconography (special mention for the Test Card Girl) and mind-bending time-bending makes it a show like no other: not necessarily enjoyable a lot of the time, but unmissable and vital, dragging you into its vividly-realised world: part social experiment, part cop show, part flashback and part dizzying head-fuck.

As you’ll know because you saw it a decade ago, John Simm is Sam Tyler, a 21st century cop who gets hits by a car and wakes up in 1973, where he clashes heads with boozy, violent, chauvinistic alpha male Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), while dealing with the fact that he appears to be in a coma, sounds from the real world bleeding into this one, in the shape of wild, terrifying hallucinations and ultimata. Each hour delivers a self-contained mystery – dealing with themes like football hooliganism, police brutality and pimping – before an absolute knockout of a final episode that ups the ante in every way imaginable, though particularly emotionally.

The details are just right (as in that gem of a sequence where Sam wonders how he could be imagining something this complete), Glenister is perfectly cast – and mostly convincing – and Simm delivers arguably the best performance of a career that began a little inauspiciously (erm, Human Traffic), vibrating with angst, confusion, compassion and a certain arrogance as he’s tipped into a never-ending nightmare that most of the time he seems to be quite enjoying. There’s a really nice turn too from Liz White as Simm’s confidante and potential girlfriend, a WPC with a philosophy degree, while Dean Andrews makes for a pitch-perfect heavy and adversary.

Sometimes the show goes for the easy gag or the predictable twist ending, but taken as a whole it’s a remarkable, ground-breaking piece of television that discombobulates, confounds and enthralls, especially when drawing us into Simm’s childhood, a seductive proposition symbolised by Joanne Froggatt’s heartbreaking characterisation as his strong, proud and independent mother, a character I’ve met a dozen times before, and who reminds me a great deal of my late nanna. (4)

See also: Simm and Glenister had previously appeared together in State of Play.

***

FILMS


No, honestly, this is a great film.

CINEMA: French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1954) – Renoir's whimsical, beautiful film about the birth of the Moulin Rouge is handled largely with the lightest of touches, reaching eternal truths along the way, before exploding into an ecstasy of music, dance and colour.

Jean Gabin - more often seen as a laconic fall guy in poetic realist pictures - is a silver fox with ineffable charm but no money, who hatches upon an idea for a new club selling slick, sexy slumming to millionaires. He also finds the girl to put it across (Françoise Arnaul): a laundry worker with the talent and drive to lead the line in the new 'French Cancan'.

There's some questionable melodrama in the story, and a bit of weak slapstick, but Renoir evokes a remarkable, singular atmosphere, through sumptuous Montmartre studio sets, Arnaul's beguiling but completely unsentimental characterisation, and a stunning sense of composition: like a broken-hearted loner stuck unmoving in a chair, as the bright, tactile bustle of a chorus line snakes around and away from him, leaving him utterly alone.

There's glorious music too - some from the rehearsals, some from thin air, some from a montaged medley featuring Edith Piaf! - before a climactic show featuring a fast-talking cabaret performer, a mellifulous whistler, chanteuse Jean Raymond's beguiling 'La sérénade du pavé', and a sort of belly-dancing Janis Paige substitute (Arnaul's chief antagonist, María Félix). Nothing, though, quite prepares you for that completely overwhelming feel-good finale: the immersive, wordless and flawlessly edited "pure cinema" of which Truffaut often spoke.

Taken minute-by-minute, it's not a faultless film, but it's a heart-melting, uniquely textured and utterly rousing experience, with just the right undertug of melancholy and sacrifice, as Renoir suggests that a great creative life means no other life at all, but that the ultimate creation makes everything else pale into nothing. On this evidence, you can see his point. (4)

(I saw this at the BFI as part of their Big Screen Classics strand.)



*MINOR SPOILERS*
The Woman Next Door (Francois Truffaut, 1981) – A completely effortless Truffaut movie: easily the best of his later films, playfully told yet with the stifling feel of a '40s Hollywood melodrama, as married man Gerard Depardieu discovers that his new neighbour is ex-lover Fanny Ardant – and that the flame never really went out.

It’s beset with an unconvincing fatalism that Truffaut fairly crowbarred into his heavier dramas, as if tragedy and its foreshadowing lent a credibility that less incongruously tragic, violent stories lacked, but it's also brilliantly-directed from that opening fourth-wall-break onwards, with a restless, endlessly inquisitive camera, and a peerless understanding of the grammar of cinema that allows him to give every scene its due (with scarcely a wasted moment), and conjure up suspense from thin air, as well as including fun visual nods to landmarks in American golden age cinema, like Double Indemnity and The Searchers.

The characterisation is also superb, with outwardly arbitrary swings into action that we – as the characters’ co-conspirators – understand implicitly, and which enliven a potentially over-familiar story, as do a deftly-judged subplot concerning the narrator, and some glorious grace notes with the children, which you could watch by themselves and still know who directed them. Truffaut never quite matched his first two films, Les 400 Coups and Shoot the Pianist, getting sidetracked by gloomy adaptations of old novels and unambitious comedies about sex, but The Woman Next Door shows a filmmaker in complete control of his genius, even if the material he’s bringing to screen isn’t quite as good – or as sustained – as it might be. (3)



Spy (Paul Feig, 2015) – Director Paul Feig and star Melissa McCarthy followed up Bridesmaids and their superb cop-comedy, The Heat, with this rather over-cooked offering. She’s a desk-bound CIA agent, but if you thought that this was going to be a great, cleverly moderated change-of-pace, a la Will Ferrell in The Other Guys, I’m afraid you’re wrong – she’s quickly back to doing exactly the same thing as normal (mostly yelling), pitched into the field after superspy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) unfortunately gets extremely shot.

McCarthy’s schtick is fine in small doses, or opposite a collaborative comedian as good as Sandra Bullock, but not so effective when she’s mostly with Rose Byrne – even if Byrne is a little less crushingly banal than usual. There are some really great jokes in here – the microphone gag, the Face/Off bit, McCarthy looking like a “homophobic aunt” – and a somewhat underused Jason Statham delivers in a specially-written part, but Miranda Hart is poor as McCarthy’s best friend, the non-sequitur sequences fall flat (hello 50 Cent) and the film ultimately runs out of steam with a good half hour to go.

It’s worth seeing once, for Feig’s usual offbeat comic sensibility, but those expecting something to rival The Heat should probably adjust their expectations. It’s also weirdly, gruesomely and excessively violent. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Deanna Durbin - Reviews #99

I've talked about Deanna Durbin before, because she is awesome. For a quick potted history, go here. Here are a couple more reviews, dealing with her final film - and then perhaps her oddest.



For the Love of Mary (Frederick de Cordova, 1948) – Former child star Deanna Durbin has at least five classic musical comedies to her name, but she was notoriously critical of her final quartet of movies. "Just take a look at my last four films and you’ll appreciate that the stories I had to defend were mediocre, near impossible," she said in her only post-retirement interview. This, the last, is arguably the best of them (though Something in the Wind has Donald O'Connor doing an earlier version of his Make 'em Laugh routine), as she genuinely gives her all to a film in which she has to wear a fake moustache while serenading Don Taylor in a park with an aria from The Barber of Seville, before falling in a lake. It's a silly but pleasant love square, in which fish expert Taylor, lawyer Jeffrey Lynn and completely unsuitable light leading man Edmond O'Brien (playing a naval officer) compete for Deanna's affections. And as she's a White House switchboard operator, naturally the President and his secretary (Ray Collins) keep sticking their oar in. Presumably the Russians weren't up to much that month. There aren't many laughs, but it's generally entertaining and sustained by Durbin's lovely, unaffected central performance. She was such an appealing presence and she had a wonderful voice – her spellbinding reading of I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen is the unquestioned highlight. It makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up. Durbin retired to Paris the next year, aged 27, marrying Charles David, who had directed her in her last truly great film, Lady on a Train. (2.5)

***

Here's what happened when Jean Renoir tried to make a Deanna Durbin film:



The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (Bruce Manning, 1943) is an uneven, frustrating WWII comedy-drama, worth seeing for Deanna Durbin's sensitive, beguiling performance, the best of her adult career. She plays a schoolteacher and missionary's daughter who comes to America with a gaggle of war orphans and has to pose as the widow of a wealthy sea captain to keep them together. Then the dead guy's grandson (Edmond O'Brien) starts taking an interest. The film was started by Jean Renoir off the back of Swamp Water. He was a fan of Durbin and regarded her as "ravishing", but dropped out of the project after interference from the studio, Universal. (We are talking about a man who didn't finish perhaps his greatest film, Partie de campagne, because it was raining.) His brilliantly-directed rustic footage is used as a flashback and offers a tantalising glimpse of what might have been, before apparent plans for a grown-up, humanist drama somehow morphed into this clumsy amalgam of effective sentiment, forced conflict (the plotting really doesn't make sense) and laboured comedy. The director said later that Durbin was "imprisoned by the genre that made her a success" - one he could not master - and criticised both the script and the manner of improvisation encouraged by producer Bruce Manning. Though two-thirds of the finished film was apparently shot by the French director, much of that was under pressure from executives following round-table discussions. Having taken over, Manning pieced together the existing footage and shot new scenes, including extra musical numbers.

The movie is at its best in the gentler moments, Durbin's nuanced characterisation to the fore, her expressive face articulating fear, resolve and quiet sorrow. There's one particularly striking close-up of the star that has Renoir's pawprints all over it. In contrast, the film's comic interludes seem incongruous and completely unnecessary, aside from a brilliant cameo from Gus Schilling near the end that comes out of nowhere and is hysterically funny. NB to Universal: if you're going to cast aside your potential masterpiece in the name of commerciality, at least try to include a few good jokes. Durbin's music is typically transcendent, particularly the glorious version of Mighty Lak' a Rose, though the numbers are shoehorned in even more arbitrarily than usual (her less inventive films tend to climax with a big charity fundraiser in which she sings). Elsewhere, peacetime makes the propagandist opening a bit of an uncomfortable watch, while time itself has rendered the billing of one young actor as simply "THE CHINESE BABY" slightly unacceptable.

It's not a great film, but for classic film fans it's essential viewing as both a picture of Durbin at the peak of her powers, and a curio: another cautionary tale of what happens when a maverick goes head-to-head with a massive fucking corporation. (2.5)

Partie time - Reviews #24

Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936) is one of the great unfinished films. Usually such projects exist in tantalising snippets because a director snuffed it before realising his vision, or failed to get a movie off the ground due to short-sighted financiers. In this case, Renoir quit because it kept raining. Admittedly it rained for much of a six-week shoot, but even so... Happily, the 40-minute Partie de campagne doesn't seem unfinished, with an intriguingly-paced three-act structure that works just fine and a heady summer atmosphere that stands as perhaps the most inspired example of its director's quiet lyricism. It's an often breathtaking pastoral film, creating a fully-realised rural world a la Tol'able David and Louisiana Story (see #24) into which to throw our protagonists.

Sylvia Bataille is Henriette, a Parisian girl who decamps to the countryside for the weekend with her parents, her grandmother and her fiance. There, she and her mother (Jane Marken) encounter a prospective-family-man-cum-intense-romantic and his caddish mate, who sweep them off their feet and onto a pair of rowing boats. But this is 19th century France, and the ties that bind won't slacken just because someone's fallen in love.

The film is gentle, entertaining and sometimes very funny, benefiting from superb performances by Bataille, Marken and young romeos Georges D'Arnoux and Jacques B. Brunius, a luscious musical score composed for its 1946 release and Renoir's effortless, transcendent handling of the material. Its coda is absolutely heartbreaking: the perfect wrap-up for a film that's shot through with unshakeable conviction and a tangible love of the countryside. Renoir's fondness for Bataille's expressive, elfin face is just as obvious - he would return to it later the same year in his fascinating serio-comic polemic Le crime de Monsieur Lange. A set piece here that sees her guilelessly embrace the pleasures of a swing is slight but somehow unforgettable. Elsewhere, Renoir's script matches the exalted treatment, encompassing as it does themes of nostalgia, teary joy and the essence of being.

But Partie de campagne does have one - perhaps major - flaw, so bizarre as to be unintelligible. That's the presentation of the father and the fiance, Anatole, as music hall imbeciles. The younger is particularly ridiculous, resembling a young Stan Laurel as he repeatedly squawks and wobbles his bottom lip. For that matter, the dad looks not unlike Oliver Hardy. Really odd. Perhaps Renoir, adapting Guy de Maupassant's novel, is making a satiric point about the unredeemable unsuitability of the young couple, or the ineptitude of Parisians cast adrift several miles from the big city, but it's a directorial decision that's never really justified.

Still, that's the only gripe about this amazing piece of work, which largely hums with brilliance and ultimately stands shoulder-to-shoulder with La grande illusion (see #62) as the director's greatest achievement.(4)

Trivia note: That's Renoir himself as the restaurateur, Poulain.