If we were a sane species, it'd be Renoir that young filmmakers would take as a model, not Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Saying that Renoir is one of maybe seven unassailable masters in the history of cinema is not unlike saying the ocean is large and blue; demonstrating a shrugging nonchalance about his best films should and will peg you to those that know about these things as a flat-out pretender. Simply, Renoir consistently took on the most complex territory available: the matrix of human camaraderie, the crystalline beauty of social respect and unexpected mutual empathies, the painful distance between the poles of a friendship under pressure, the folly and deathlessness of crazed romance. For Renoir, the tensile strength of love in all of its realizations was an inexhaustible subject, and no one explored it as wisely and whole-heartedly as he did.
Thus, any Renoir, even the lesser canon entries, are commanding of a moviegoer's attention, just as even the slightest Degas sketch is worth a gilt frame and a few million bucks. And the films command that attention because they are Renoir's, because they are a facet in his worldview, a slice of his expression of the world. Elena and Her Men (1956), therefore, is minor-key but essential Renoir, a frivolous but sage romantic comedy - or "fantasie musicale," as the credits put it - crafted during the later, artifice-entranced phase of his career, when dizzy launches through old-school theatrical milieus provided the filmmaker with a window on social ideas of performance and behavior. In fact, Elena forms an ersatz trilogy with The Golden Coach (1952) and French Cancan (1954), as a kind of tripartite way to look at French history and French identity as a kind of performance, a uniquely optimistic dance between love and death.
Visualized as a theatrical chaos that burst its stage's borders long before we showed up, Elena is a tumult, focused on Ingrid Bergman (in her only French film, speaking lovely French) as the rather flighty Polish princess of the title, ensconced in Paris in the 1880s on Bastille Day. The target for constant marriage proposals, the princess wades down into the parade and beguiles both Mel Ferrer's royal dandy and Jean Marais's celebrity general. The context roughly mirrors the real-life rise of military leader Georges Boulanger in 1889 as a popular savior of the Third Republic after decades of insane strife and inter-party conflict, which to his opponents pegged him as a reactionary threat and the possible engine behind a coup d'etat. The politics of this heady historical moment are wound through Elena and, for an American, difficult to disentangle, but thankfully Renoir's point is that state power is the flipside of romantic desire and ego, and the maddening knot they make together is as absurd as it is, finally, predictably human.
The tale charges from there to a suitor's castle (outrageously decorated with mannequins in battle dress) to a war-torn country inn, weaving in three lovers for Elena, two would-be wives for Marais's super-general, at least three other menage a trois, a troop of Third Republic politicos, lost balloonists held as political prisoners by the Germans (this is after the Franco-Prussian War), servants and soldiers, battle skirmishes, and much more, a canvas so busy you could use a chart to decipher it. But of course Renoir trusts us to enjoy the bustling, silly throng as he does, and the movie is thick with chiffon-light schtick and physical comedy (always seen across the room in wide shot, so you might miss it if you're not paying attention or, God forbid, watching it on a "personal screen"), most of it hinging on Elena's fickle heart and her strange obsession with propelling a man, any man, to world-changing greatness. The staging and overlit cinematography tells you everything - it's a "fantasy," a daydream about history as a muddle about romance.
The personnel on hand makes Elena and Her Men even odder - surrounded by a reliable phalanx of rotund and blustery French character actors (excluding Ferrer, who's just bland), Bergman feels a bit like a nurse chaperoning a mental ward's game of charades. Always the pre-eminent Hollywood Queen of Doubt, Worry and Rue (the Meryl Streep of her time), Bergman always had a tough time coming off less than razor-bright; her success as a star had everything to do with her capable intelligence and willful gaze. Here, loosened up and running amok a little after her grave Roberto Rossellini period, she isn't as convincing in her flibbertigibbet character as she is just wonderfully herself, having fun in the hands of a buoyant master, and basking in his irreverent, all-you-need-is-love humanism.
Still, the star sometimes gets subsumed in this densely inhabited ensemble movie, and faces continue to pop out at you - a third-act intrusion of Gypsies include the startling visage of famous chansoniste Juliette Greco and the legendary Gaston Modot, veteran of French silent cinema, of Bunuel's L'Age d'Or (1930), and, significantly, of Le Regle de Jeu, of which Elena plays like a hurdy-gurdy music-hall cover version. For Renoir, the entirety of humanity's mess is more entrancing and bedeviling than the plight of any individual, and each of his films is a gift, and an inoculation against alienation and loneliness.
Producer: Joseph Bercholz, Henry Deutschmeister, Edouard Gide
Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir (scenario & adaptation and dialogue); Jean Serge (adaptation)
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Music: Joseph Kosma
Film Editing: Borys Lewin
Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Elena Sokorowska), Jean Marais (Général François Rollan), Mel Ferrer (Le comte Henri de Chevincourt), Jean Richard (Hector), Juliette Gréco (Miarka, la gitane), Pierre Bertin (Martin-Michaud), Dora Doll (Rosa la Rose), Frédéric Duvallès (Gaudin), Renaud Mary (Fleury), Jacques Morel (Duchêne).
C-95m.
by Michael Atkinson
