Synopsis: Boudu (Michel Simon), a Parisian bum, decides to drown himself in the Seine after losing his dog. Lestingois (Charles Granval), a well-intentioned bourgeois bookshop owner, rescues Boudu and takes him in. Boudu proceeds to turn the Lestingois household on its head, scandalizing everyone with his uncivilized manners and making overtures towards the maid and Madame Lestingois herself.
The advent of sound in cinema fundamentally transformed the medium. While it notoriously ended many careers, sound technology enabled Jean Renoir to formulate a new aesthetic in which the soundtrack supported the image's capacity for realism. Renoir's first truly great films, the savage comedies
La Chienne (1931) and
Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), do not generally resort to the showy effects of other early sound films such as the Rene Clair comedies. Instead, Renoir cannily understood that direct sound could lend scenes atmospheric density, and that it could open up new possibilities for screen performance. The Criterion Collection's beautiful new edition of
Boudu Saved from Drowning enables us to revisit this crucial, underrepresented period in Renoir's career.
For me
Boudu remains Renoir's greatest comedy after his masterpiece
Rules of the Game (1939). His other great films of the Thirties are more somber in tone, while his comedies of the postwar era such as
The Golden Coach (1952) and
French Can Can (1955) don't resonate as deeply and aren't as well acted. At the core of
Boudu is Michel Simon's astonishing performance in the title role. Giving the lie to Lestingois' drawing-room fantasies of Priapus chasing Chloe, Boudu staggers about like a drunk, rolling his eyes, climbing up on tables and singing in a hoarse, off-key voice. Even while we envy his anarchic spirit, we are a little terrified of him like the Lestingois family. One reason why this film works so much better than
Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Paul Mazursky's remake, is precisely that Renoir allows Michel Simon to push his performance to the limits while keeping the other actors more or less in check. By making the Whiteman family more eccentric, Mazursky loses the sharp contrast and ultimately some of the comic edge of Renoir's film.
Renoir also cannot resist some delicious jokes at the expense of bourgeois society. The family piano sits mostly unused, and M. Lestingois justifies its presence to the maid by stating, "[…] we have a piano because we're respectable people." Not even their attempts at charity emerge unscathed; while Lestingois is busy performing resuscitation on Boudu, the onlookers talk of a medal for his efforts. Later, regretting his decision to take in the bum, Lestingois declares: "One should only come to the aid of one's equals." One of my favorite bits is a throwaway gag in which we see the maid dusting a frightfully tacky decoration consisting of stuffed birds perched on a branch.
Though adapted from a stage farce,
Boudu is far from stagy or uncinematic. Thanks to Renoir's use of direct sound and the clear-eyed photography of Marcel Lucien and Georges Asselin, the park, street and countryside locations really capture the flavor of France in the Thirties. Particularly striking is Renoir's frequent use of deep focus photography, years before Gregg Toland employed similar techniques in Hollywood films such as
Dead End (1937) and
Citizen Kane (1941). That, and the film's virtuoso camera movements, which include a complex tracking shot through a corridor in the Lestingois apartment and an unexpected boat ride pulling away from an orchestra while it plays the "Blue Danube Waltz," demonstrate the extent to which Renoir was already a master of visual style at this stage of his career.
I've seen multiple versions of
Boudu Saved from Drowning on 16mm, VHS and laserdisc, and Criterion's new DVD transfer easily surpasses them all in terms of detail and contrast. There is some damage to the print, but it looks remarkably clean considering the film's age. My one possible reservation is that the credits on the Criterion transfer suggest an aspect ratio of approximately 1.2:1 typical of European films in the early sound era, whereas the rest of the film has been transferred at 1.33:1. The framing looks fine, but the compositions might be a little tight for those with a lot of overscan on their television sets. The sound in Renoir's early sound films was always of variable quality, given the technological limitations in France at that time and Renoir's insistence on shooting with direct sound whenever possible. However, the restored mono soundtrack on the Criterion disc seems clearer than I recall on older versions.
Extras include: a 1967 interview with Jean Renoir and Michel Simon on the television series
Cineastes de notre temps and an interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin, former Godard collaborator, who offers a good analysis of Simon's performance and Renoir's filmmaking style. I especially enjoyed the conversation between Eric Rohmer and critic Jean Douchet, who speak insightfully for almost half an hour on the film; it's difficult to imagine such a fluent and broad-ranging conversation about a film on broadcast television today, even on public television.
In contrast, Christopher Faulkner's liner notes essay has some interesting ideas to be sure, but it's an alphabet soup of contemporary academic jargon. The closing sentence of the essay reads: "The political geography of the self in social space has to be a somatic geography." Those who like to curl up by the fire with heavily underlined copies of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan will no doubt nod with approval at this assertion, but the rest of us would have preferred a more concrete statement about the film itself. In a similar vein, the voice accompanying the disc's "Interactive Map of 1930s Paris" blithely intones: "The social and psychic conflicts of Paris not only get written on the bodies in the city, in other words, they get written on the body of the city." In principle, the content on discs like this should be pitched to the average college-educated audience, not to Comparative Literature scholars. Nonetheless, the disc as a whole earns a very strong recommendation.
For more information about
Boudu Saved From Drowning, visit
The Criterion Collection. To order
Boudu Saved From Drowning, go to
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by James Steffen
