-Devdutt Trivedi
Boudu sauvé des eaux also known as Boudu Saved from Drowning is perhaps Renoir’s most important film from his first phase following his important silent works, Nana (1926), Tire Au Flanc (The Sad Sack, 1928) and the masterful La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931) with the same lead actor as Boudu Saved from Drowning, Michel Simon.
Simon, an important theatre actor and comedian suggested that Renoir do an adaptation of René Fauchois’ play Boudu. Renoir saw the potential of Simon playing a tramp when he re-looked at the final sequence of La Chienne and went ahead with adapting the Fauchois play. Following Boudu Saved from Drowning and two minor works, Chotard et Cie (Chotard And Company, 1932) and the more significant Madame Bovary (1933), Renoir would begin his second and most important phase beginning with Toni (1935) that would end with his migration to America and completion of Swamp Water in 1941.
When Renoir looked back at the film with Simon in their historically significant chat in 1967 broadcast on French television, the two agreed that the film was superior to La Chienne. The two believed it was the most important of Renoir’s early works in light of both Renoir’s career and the developing cinema techniques in France. These techniques were largely in opposition to Russian montage, where successive shots produced meaning through the operation of addition. Directors from France at the time opposed montage by breaking narrative into chunks of choreographed long shots where each shot functioned as a new beginning.
Renoir describes the film as a ‘free exercise around the actor’, centered on the nomadic character of Boudu played by Simon, an outcast in the hierarchical Parisian society of the ‘30s. The film was opposite in premise to Fauchois’ play which had the bourgeoisie Monsieur Lestingois at its center. Renoir subverted the premise of the play to capture a nomadic logic of images.
Renoir finds his origins in the theatre, specifically its ability to improvise sequences as if occurring right in front of the audience. The humour and social commentary contrast Renoir’s approach to theatre with literature, especially the characters in Boudu Saved From Drowning which come from the La Comédie humaine novels by Honore De Balzac (1799-1850), perhaps the most outstanding and important French novelist of all. In the film, Boudu spits on one of the copies of Balzac’s Physiology of Marriage belonging to the bookseller Lestingois, making Balzac both an intertextual device and representative of bourgeoisie values.
However the film itself is stripped of theatre and literature and is in the tradition cinema namely that of the Lumiere Brothers’ location-filming experiments. Renoir sides with the technique adopted by the Lumiere Brothers over the studio produced and meticulously constructed films of Georges Méliès. Renoir would himself continue to develop these techniques and make them his own until he perfected them in his masterwork La Règle De Jeu in 1939. These techniques would influence the next two generations of film makers in their debuts, as diverse as Robert Bresson (Les Dames De Bois Du Bolougne, 1945), Francois Truffaut (Les Quatra Cent Coup, 1959) and Jean-Luc Godard (À bout de souffle, 1959).
Although the narrative has no centering, with the story having several central character subjects, the other characters work around the movements of Boudu and only exist as a reaction to his primary initiations. Boudu himself stands for a de-centered movement that splits the construction of the scenario into random movement and meaning. Bourgeoisie morality and security as represented by Lestingois are made redundant by Boudu through the very approach that defines it i.e. logic, in Boudu’s case the logic of chaos. An example is the scene where Boudu, with Mme. Lestingois in the foreground, spills wine on the table. When asked by Madame Lestingois as to why he is doing it, Boudu calmly explains his attempt at fishing out salt from the wine having added the salt himself a few moments earlier.
Renoir begins to work with his deep focus aesthetic, where action is spread through a number of successive layers within a single static shot. Renoir was against the idea of setting up a definite and limited frame. The frame generally defines the limits of spectatorial gaze and Renoir instead insists on allowing a more general field, where many things occur simultaneously through different successive planes. This allows him to capture the randomness in any given setting especially one with a misfit like Boudu.A remarkable example of this is the sequence at Lestingois’ apartment after Boudu’s failed attempt at drowning, where the onlookers are at the back of the room and Boudu in the extreme foreground is being caressed out of his stupor by Lestingois. Renoir here, chooses to frame the actor from the front, a technique only found in silent films, as opposed to that of most directors at the time (and even now) who preferred framing from an angle. Another similar sequence is the one where Boudu first sits out to dinner with the Lestingois family. Renoir films the dinner table from the corridor and tracks parallel to the succession of doors, only to track into the widow with the neighbour peering out of the kitchen. This is followed by a reverse shot which shows Anne Marie in her kitchen in a similar position. This technique, allows every shot to function as a new opportunity for character development
Although Boudu stands for nomadic nature, the interiority of the film i.e. the fact that it is shot in interiors of a domestic space, contradicts the difficulty of filming nature. Although most commentators have agreed that the interiority adds to the repressive aura of the Parisian middle class, its primary function is to appropriate the exterior shots of nature. These sequences around the Siene and on the street in Paris are stabilized with the shots in the Lestingois apartment.
The interiors give a functional use to their objects, both for the characters as well as for the forwarding of the mise en scene. Take the use of the piano, which serves the function of providing background music and defining the mood of a particular scene. When Lestingois spots Boudu, the cheerful notes of Anne Marie playing the piano make it function as a background score. In another scene where Monsieur and Madame Lestingois are arguing, the selection of notes they hit defines the nature of their quarrel. The telescope is also used as device to construct mise en scene. After Lestingois looks through the telescope, Renoir cuts to an iris, a specific cinematic device to point out a character from a larger whole, through which out of the totality of Paris’ public, Boudu is singled out, to communicate to the audience, Lestingois’ gaze which makes Boudu a spectacle. In this way Renoir attempts to make actors, within the diagetic space of the frame, use objects to create cinematic devices that make a sequence more effective. This
use of interiority, with its emphasis on objects especially with the repetitive use of upward and downward movement of characters on the staircase, would be a great influence on the cinema of Max Ophuls in his Madame De(1953) and in the Hollywood masterpieces of Ernest Lubitsch especially The Shop Around the Corner(1940). The interior becomes a space for artifice as opposed to the unmediated reality of the exterior, an idea which Satyajit Ray would make more specific in Charulata (1962).
Like all of Renoir’s other work, this is not a simple film in the sense that it is not only a simplistic critique of the bourgeoisie. Renoir, while siding with Boudu, is also showing the audience the humane side to the ruthless Lestingois. He is also indicating the comedic side to Lestingois’ apparent compassion for Boudu. He saves Boudu for his own amusement as Boudu, being the nomadic lumpen, is a freak that appeals to his gaze and fills Lestingois with self-importance, indicated in the sequence where Lestingois looks through the telescope at Boudu. The outstanding thing about Renoir is he brings out Lestingois’ self-importance, in the tradition of the best of Balzac, through humour.
Renoir tries to emphasize the humane bits of middle-class culture by showing compassion for their lack of comprehension of Boudu’s acts, consisting of potent violence, so that the audience may be found siding with the Lestingois family over Boudu. Renoir approaches the Lestingois family (as representative of bourgeoisie values) through the act of filming randomness within a construct. The construct here is the middle class interiority with the body of Simon-Boudu within this interiority becoming a crystallized version of this randomness in the construct. Bresson would take this aesthetic forward with what he would call ‘models’, actors devoid of theatrical expressionism so that the actor’s utterance becomes autonomous of psychological causality.
Mani Kaul defines the two sides to cinematic development through space, location-space and narrative-space. In the case of the Jean Renoir of Boudu Saved From Drowning, the split is between character-actor space denoted by the bumbling movements of Simon and the location-space of Paris in 1932.
The film was rejected by the public in Paris at the time of its opening for its depiction of the rawness of Boudu’s character, especially in the sequences where Boudu eats sardines with bare hands and wipes his shoes with the bed sheet. However the character of Boudu in the film would be hailed and further developed through the body of Simon, two years later, by Jean Vigo in his masterpiece L’Atalante.