057 - Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932, France. Dir. Jean Renoir.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

057 - Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932, France. Dir. Jean Renoir.

Edouard Lestingois owns a bookstore.

Can you think of a more exciting situation in film history?

Yes.

He lives in an apartment in the bookstore, with secret doors and a spiral staircase leading back and forth between the two.

Now that is just about as wonderful as one can imagine.

But Renoir paints him as an upper-class merchant owner indulging in hypocrisy.

His bookstore is on a street along the Seine River.  His office overlooks the river.

His wife lives upstairs.  His mistress lives downstairs.

This is Paris in the 1930s.

His mistress is actually his servant girl, and his wife does not know about their extra-curricular reading.

But she will get her turn to do some reading of her own.

Boudu is a homeless man, with shaggy hair and a shaggy beard.  And a shaggy dog.

He sits in the park beneath a tree petting his dog.  His dog runs off.  He asks for help.  People turn away from him.  He asks a police officer.  The officer tells him to scram, or he will run him in.

A pretty woman approaches the officer, also looking for her dog, which in her case is worth a lot of money, and the officer is all too eager to help.

The film is a bit heavy-handed in its diatribe against hypocrisy.

Boudu throws himself in the river.

Lestingois sees it from his office balcony.

Lestingois saves Boudu from drowning.

The public view him as a hero.  Boudu is annoyed with him.  Lestingois does not see the big deal.

Lestingois allows Boudu to live in the apartment with them.  He dresses him well and gives him leeway.  He indulges him.

And to his surprise, and to his wife's chagrin, Boudu's nature does not change.  He does not awaken the next morning behaving as an upper-class merchant owner who grew up in cotillion.  He behaves as an overdressed homeless man living in a luxury apartment.

And ruining it.

He is a bull in a china shop.

One gets the impression Renoir took pleasure in cracking the crystal of the upper-class mores with which he would have been all-too-familiar.

Boudu will seduce the wife.

Boudu will win the lottery.

Boudu will marry the servant girl.

And where do you think Boudu will prefer to be?

Alone.  Homeless.  Begging bread.  Scavenging along the river.

Remember the river.  It will play heavily in the films of Jean Renoir.