Jean Renoir (1938)

You wouldn’t think of Emile Zola – or at least the grimly determinist side of him – and Jean Renoir, with his nuanced humanism, as natural collaborators, and they’re not.  But Renoir’s gifts allow him to go a long way towards concealing the inherent tension between this fascinating film and the Zola novel on which it’s based.  (Renoir did the screenplay, to which Denise Leblond contributed (uncredited) dialogue.)  The train engineer Jacques Lantier is doomed by ‘tainted blood’.  The locomotive he drives, headed for its destination, symbolises the ineluctability of Lantier’s fate – its nearly monstrous mechanical power is a physical expression of the odds stacked against the man on board.  In the wonderful railway sequences, rightly described by Pauline Kael as ‘poetic yet realistic’, the train in Renoir’s film retains a powerful symbolism yet it’s a richer entity than that – the combination of sight and sound and movement, the relationship between Lantier and the engine make it a leading character in a way that excitingly justifies Zola’s title.

Although I’m suspicious of Zola’s sins-of-the-fathers determinism (not least because it allows fate to write the plot), Renoir’s La bête humaine is an engrossing psychological thriller.  The expressive lighting by Curt Courant gives the piece a proto-noir quality.  The sense of mystery is deepened by the reality of the settings and the things in them – the engine sheds, the engineers’ tools, the food and drink.  The superb cast is headed by Jean Gabin as Lantier.  One of the extraordinary things about Gabin as an actor is that, as you watch him, you feel you’re experiencing the passage of time just as the character he’s playing is experiencing it.  Fernand Ledoux, best known as a theatre actor, is magnificent as the station-master Roubaud:  when this cuckold looks at his wife Séverine, his face can be drained of expression then instantly transformed into something desperately, childishly needy.  As Séverine, Simone Simon manages to be both tantalising and doomed.  Julien Carette, as Pecqueux, Lantier’s assistant on the train, is as witty as he’s truthful. Strange to say, the only performance that seems out of kilter is Renoir’s own cameo as a criminal wrongly convicted of the murder on the train that’s pivotal to the story.  It’s striking but more crudely theatrical than the surely subtle playing he gets from everyone else.

10 May 2012