Jean Renoir (1954)
As Henri Danglard, the café owner who buys a property that will become the Moulin Rouge, Jean Gabin is masterly. His naturalism is so expressive, magnetic and easy that, for much of the time, he seems blessedly independent of all the frenetic theatricality going on around him. When Danglard delivers a sudden, heated monologue about what the dance hall means to him, Gabin is transformed and you understand the character’s passion. It happens again, as the film’s musical climax gathers momentum. Danglard is in a back room, away from but within earshot of the action onstage. Alone in the room (except for a fire marshal), he starts flexing his leg, then tapping his foot to the rhythm of the music. Gabin’s contained passion makes him the calm centre of French Cancan. There’s also a lovely chemistry between Françoise Arnoul, as the ingénue Nini (her face recalls Claudette Colbert), and Gianni Esposito, as the pale, convincingly lovesick prince who’s crazy about her (but it’s dancing she loves). Otherwise, the performances are full-blooded and accomplished but the hyperactivity is rather wearying. I guess I’ve an inbuilt resistance to French cabaret singing and comedy: although I liked the Pagliacci whistler here, I found other turns – and, to be honest, much of the movie as a whole – hard to enjoy. The movement of the film, though, is a wonder throughout. Renoir switches effortlessly between an intimate moment between two people and an explosion of crowd activity, and the finale is exhilarating. The directors and editors of Moulin Rouge! and Chicago would do well to watch and learn from French Cancan: Renoir and his editor Borys Lewin show how to make a musical number visually exciting without destroying its rhythm. Onstage and offstage are in such close proximity that they nearly collide: Renoir conveys a powerful sense of what it’s like being part of the audience and part of the performance too. By the end, you feel the connection – the shared quiet authority – between Jean Gabin’s portrait of Danglard and Jean Renoir’s direction, between the prime mover behind the Moulin Rouge and the presiding genius of French Cancan.
24 August 2011
