Grand illusions

Jean Renoir at the Harvard Film Archive

by Peter Keough

"THE RENOIR OPERA." At the Harvard Film Archive July 3 through 31.

"The end of the war," sadly notes German aristocrat and prison-camp commandant Major von Rauffenstein to French aristocrat and prisoner of war Captain de Boeldieu in The Grand Illusion, "will be the end of us." Gifted with the clairvoyance of director Jean Renoir's hindsight, Rauffenstein foretells the downfall of aristocracy and empire to follow World War I.

Perhaps Renoir at the moment was predicting something less obvious and closer to home, the downfall of the filmmaker as artist. In truth, though, directors of the stature of Renoir have always been as rare as Rauffenstein's geranium, perennially supplanted by technicians, businessmen, and marketing experts for whom cinema is a disposable product for thoughtless consumers. Auteurs like Renoir, creators who can shape a personal vision over six decades, 36 films, four countries, and many genres, have been deposed by the quiet revolution of bad taste and corporate greed.

Fortunately, Renoir's exploits in the grand illusion of cinema are less ephemeral than Rauffenstein's in that of warfare. This month the Harvard Film Archive hosts the retrospective "The Jean Renoir Opera," which offers a dozen features plus various shorts and documentaries that bring a bracing taste of his ironic pastoral vision to the summer.

Unlike the sometimes cloying sentimentalism of his artist father, Auguste, Renoir's preoccupation with the conflict between nature and artifice, between the real and the illusory, is bittersweet. His style eschews the manipulative fragmentation of montage and the sleek narrative conventions of Hollywood, so he is often regarded as a naturalist, a filmmaker who uses his art to penetrate to an innate, objective reality. But Renoir knows that naturalism, too, is only an artistic device, that the rules of human artifice are as inescapable as the limitations of nature.

That's the case with A Day in the Country (1936; screens July 10 at 7 p.m. and July 14 at 7 p.m.), a 37-minute miniature masterpiece that epitomizes Renoir's oeuvre. Based on a Guy de Maupassant short story, it was stopped in production in 1936 and finally released 10 years later as a short. A milkman takes the family to the country in his wagon, and they desport by the banks of the river under the eyes of a pair of romantically inclined idlers, who appreciate the charms of the daughter and the wife. Distracted by his dull-witted employee and some fishing rods, the milkman allows the strangers to take his women boating. Both ladies have romantic encounters: the mother's is bawdy, but the daughter's is heartbreaking -- the cut from her first kiss to a gathering storm and the melancholy passage of the river to a title card "Many years later . . . " expresses a lifetime of rue and diminished expectations.

Water, which Renoir never tired of filming, plays a key role also in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932; July 3 at 7 p.m. and July 7 at 6:30 p.m.). Boudu (Michael Simon), the tramp, is a simple man: when the police refuse to look for his lost dog, mobilizing instead to track down a wealthy dowager's stray poodle, he jumps into the Seine. Lestingois, the bookseller, is a happy bourgeois. He has a wife, a mistress, a telescope, and middle-class virtues, so when he spots Boudu in the drink, he rescues him and offers him his hospitality. With his shameless appetites and bad manners, Boudu revolutionizes the household; meanwhile society, with its clothes, lottery tickets, and amours, seeks to reclaim the beast for its own.

It's a simple fable (imitated with much less success by Paul Mazursky in his 1986 Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and touched on in Hal Hartley's upcoming Henry Fool) that Renoir approaches with slapstick wit and casual profundity, as when Lestingois savors the pre-drowning "archetypical tramp" through his spyglass, only to be drawn, like the audience, into something more than light entertainment.

A river is also central to one of Renoir's last films, Picnic on the Grass (1959; July 24 at 9 p.m. and July 26 at 9 p.m.), an odd satire that pits scientific hubris against the perseverance of nature. Representing the former is a repressed professor running for "President of Europe" under an artificial-insemination program. Undergoing the ill-considered repast with his termagant fiancée as a publicity event (the film is timely in a weird way), the professor falls victim to the Manet-esque landscape, a goatherd's pan pipes, and a robust peasant girl seeking a child. Lushly beautiful, broadly comic, and heavy-handed, it's a case of Renoir getting contrived when espousing the virtues of nature.

So too is The River (1950; July 16 at 7 p.m., July 18 at 6 p.m., and July 19 at 6:30 p.m.) -- the Renoir film that most overtly probes into nature is one framed by that hoariest of cinematic devices, the voiceover narrative. The voice belongs to a grown-up Harriet reminiscing on the banks of the Ganges. In between National Geographic-like commentary and bad poetry about the river ("The river flows/The world turns . . . ") Harriet unfolds a magical fairy tale about three beautiful maidens and their prince-like suitor.

The hero, however, is an all-too-flawed American war veteran propped up on an artificial leg, and while Harriet indulges her rivalry for his hand with her two best friends and broods on the meaning of it all posed by the mighty Ganges (like Boudu, she commits herself to the river's water in a moment of despair), she overlooks the cobra lurking in the bo tree waiting to strike the heart of her family. At times Renoir's attempt to grasp the river's essence seems about to sink under the film's layers of conventions. The River is brittle with clichés that sound culled from popular romances and Introduction to Eastern Philosophy 101. But that may be the point. The search for meaning ends not in understanding but in an artifact, which itself demands interpretation.

We're given an artifact and then some in The Golden Coach (1953; July 24 at 7 p.m. and July 25 at 9 p.m.). Characters in Renoir films invariably create their own symbols, and they come up with a doozy in The Golden Coach: a gilt coach-and-four ordered from England by an 18th-century Spanish viceroy (Duncan Lamont) to impress his New World subjects. But the viceroy himself is bowled over by that consummate artifice, the commedia dell'arte, a troupe of which has just arrived from Italy. He has fallen for the troupe's star, Camilla (played by a plump and pleasingly coarse Anna Magnani), who has also won the hearts of a moralistic soldier (Odoardo Spadoro) and an impulsive toreador (Nada Fiorelli).

Camilla's private and artistic affairs soon spread to the public sector as the viceroy's involvement brings him into conflict with his court. Unlike his earlier masterpieces, The Golden Coach and such later Renoir films as Elena and Her Men (1956) and French Cancan (1952) allow art to triumph over politics, society, and history. But this too, Renoir reminds us, is an illusion: the film begins and ends with a proscenium, and the hapless Camilla is left before the fallen curtain, alone.

The proscenium also looms over The Grand Illusion (1937; July 11 at 7 p.m. and July 14 at 7 p.m.). French officers in a German prison camp put on a musical revue in drag; a report of a French victory interrupts, and they break out into "La Marsellaise." Their desperate attempt to escape into the illusion of theater is dissolved by the even more desperate illusion of history.

For Renoir, escape is one of the grandest human illusions. Here three charming POWs never give up trying to break out of the camps and back into the greater prison of class and national struggles that is the world outside. The spectrum of French society is represented by the nobleman Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), the Jewish banker's son Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), and the mechanic Maréchal (Jean Gabin). They live in harmony among their fellow, free-spirited inmates, yet they suspect that their camaraderie is illusory, that the realities of society and history will prevail outside the microcosm of the prison. Meaning becomes the ultimate illusion; in the end Boeldieu and his fellow nobleman Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) must redeem their "useless lives" with such symbolic scraps as a geranium, white gloves, a flute, and self-sacrifice.

A different kind of prison awaits the hero of The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936; July 3 at 9 p.m. and July 4 at 7 p.m.). The crime is murder, but as Valentine (Florelle) explains to those who would turn her sweetheart, Monsieur Lange (René Lefèvre), in, there's more to the story than that. The mousy employee of Batala (Jules Berry), a gloriously venal publisher, Lange transcends his dreary fate by writing in his spare hours the heroic continuing saga of Arizona Jim. In a desperate effort to save his company, Batala obtains the rights to the pulp cowboy from Lange and markets it as a magazine serial. But the publishing house goes under anyway, and Batala vanishes, apparently perishing in a train accident. With the help of an enlightened if frivolous playboy, Lange reforms the company into a successful cooperative.

Renoir has the same good fortune with the lowly crime-melodrama genre that Lange does with Cowboy Jim. He exults in its conventions -- the speeding car, the circular narrative, the twists of plot -- and his gaiety pushes the proceedings to the brink of farce. This giddy tone leaves us vulnerable to the film's socialist subtext, and to the moments when it is most poetic, as when an image of a scoundrel's lonely death briefly dissolves the artifice.

Death makes a deflating appearance as well in Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (1939; screens July 28 at 6:30 p.m. and July 30 at 9 p.m.). To the strains of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, a wire-tangled radio reporter announces the landing of André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), who has just made a record-breaking transatlantic flight. He's a hero, but as his pal Octave (played by Renoir himself) tells him later, he doesn't know how to play the role. Asked by the announcer how he feels, Jurieu says he's never felt worse in his life; the woman he did it all for didn't show up to meet him.

That woman is Christine (Nora Grégor), wife of the bon vivant count Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), who's giving a big party at his estate. Even though Jurieu fails to heed the accepted rules of decorum (the role of impulsive romantic he embraces is about a century out of date), La Chesnaye invites him anyway, at Octave's urging. Perhaps, too, La Chesnaye is feeling guilty about cheating on his faithful wife with his mistress Geneviève.

And so they all arrive, plus a host of other vibrantly realized characters, to act out their dance of appearance and reality, artifice and desire. La Chesnaye, a collector of 18th-century automata, regales his guests with devices that, like cinema, simulate life. Real life intrudes: the slaughter of the estate's rabbits is made a sport (in a sequence that is perhaps Renoir's most brutally naturalistic -- and artificial), and a gun-wielding, cuckolded husband's outburst is seen as just another party game.

Consequences notwithstanding, perhaps it is. As The Rules of the Game and the rest of Renoir's oeuvre show, the human condition may be absurd, deluded, and tragically ironic, but it can also be as rich, limpid, and exultant as a Mozart opera when refined into a work of art. The same capacity for illusion that dooms us also redeems us.