Jean Renoir (1935)
There’s a tension between the screenplay – which Jean Renoir wrote with Carl Einstein, a man whose political sympathies were more decided than his own – and Renoir’s naturally humanistic approach to his characters as a director. There may also be a tension between this approach and the true crime basis of the material, which increases the risk of thin characterisation. At the start of the film, the eponymous Toni, an Italian, arrives in Provence as one of a group of immigrant labourers from various parts of Western Europe. Toni is smitten with Josefa, a volatile Spanish woman, who eventually marries the Belgian Albert, a brutish foreman in the quarry where Toni works. A character like Albert, or like the perfidious Gabi, isn’t, in Renoir’s world, simply dislikeable. Nor is Toni wholly likeable: his unkind treatment of Marie, the woman he lovelessly marries, is due to her advancing years and lack of financial prospects, as well as Toni’s passion for Josefa. Toni is considered seminal in the development of Italian neorealism (Luchino Visconti was Renoir’s assistant director). Perhaps it’s more a film to be studied in that context (it was showing in the BFI’s ‘The Roots of Neorealism’ season) than fully satisfying in itself.
Even so, Toni contains many remarkable things. The rousing, resilient quality of the workers’ songs, heard at several points in the film, adds to the ironic, tragic force of the song sung at the very end by a new group of arriving immigrants. The climactic pursuit of Toni, now a wanted man, by the local police and their dogs, builds powerfully. Toni’s desperate sprint over a railway bridge, his collapse, after being shot, against the sympathetic Fernand, the oblivious passage of the train – these are all fine images, even if the words that Fernand is given to speak as Toni dies in his arms are obvious and overly summarising. Earlier sequences – in which Marie, having tried to drown herself, emerges from the water and Albert takes his belt to Josefa – are startling. After Josefa has fought back and killed Albert, Gabi and Toni enter the scene of the crime: you know what is to be discovered there but the first thing the two men and the viewer see is not the man’s corpse but a cat eating scraps. Once you know that Toni is based on the records of a real-life crime of passion in the French provinces, you know too that Toni is going to take the rap. Yet Charles Blavette’s persistent ordinariness and core of decency make it seem impossible that will happen. This is an upside of Renoir’s use of mainly non-professional actors (Blavette went on to make plenty more films). A downside may be the tendency to line readings that are sometimes too flat. But as faces and bodies the members of the cast seem very right: they include, as well as Blavette, Celia Montalván (Josefa), Edouard Delmont (Fernand), Max Dalban (Albert), Jenny Hélia (Marie) and Andrex [sic] (Gabi). According to an essay by Tom Milne, the film was shot on location by Renoir, with his nephew Claude as DoP, in the small town of Les Martigues, where the actual events that are the source of Toni also took place.
14 May 2013
