+Renoir (the film)

+Renoir (France, 2012, 112 min)

Gille +Bourdos uses the well-known stories of the painter father Pierre-Auguste and the filmmaker son Jean Renoir for a film that is at once breathtaking spectacle and a profound anatomy of the impulses and values of art. The film was one of my highlights at this year's +Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The plot presents the 74-year-old veteran painter (Michel Bouquet) and his ravishing new 15-year-old model, Andree Heuschling (Christa Theret) enjoying their opulent country estate while WW I pounds the humanity outside. Mark Lee Ping-Bin shoots the interiors with classic Dutch light and shadow but the exteriors in the unbridled luminosity of Impressionism. Here Renoir explains that structure comes from colour, not form, and he refuses to use black. That summarizes the painter's Impressionism: it finds reality in what he makes of the outside world, not what it firmly may be. His swirls of rosy chub continues his celebration of the young “velvet” flesh, despite the war’s flensing and destruction of the flesh beyond the estate and his age’s grotesque gnarl and ruin of his bones. His painting days, like his valiant denial of death, are limited.

Son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) returns from the front with a symbol of the reality his father rejects: an open wound. The family has a variety of open wounds, from the loss of the boys’ mother and the favoured model/nanny Gabrielle to the sons’ resentment of their father’s aloofness. The cut to the bone represents the reality Renoir’s fleshy ladies and painted pommes reject. Vincent’s convalescence goes beyond the flesh gap to include winning Andree, who -- a closing title tells us -- married him, starred in many films (as Catherine Hessling), and after their split died alone in poverty. The sins of the father don’t just visit the son but move in with him.

The tension between the painter’s idealized flesh and the its horrific reality are frequently imaged, especially in the eating scenes and in the kitchen where a maid delicately peels a tomato, removing a hide to expose a succulent flesh. The hanging carrion are an implicit reminder of the hunting and killing of the human prey outside. Renoir pere screams from the nightmares he doesn’t have his sunshine, models and pink paints to ward off.  

Around the story of Renoir pere beats a more subtle story of Renoir fils. Like Andree, the film serves both father and son. Unobtrusively Bourdos weaves in the specific sources of Renoir’s cinema. These include his sense that wars shatter natural cross-border fraternities, the harshness of the class prejudices, the increasing disrespect for culture, the necessity for art. Even the quintessential understanding which will become “The terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons.”

In addition to this humanism particular images anticipate the Renoir films. In the brothel where Jean retrieves Andree, an officer with a burned face struts out with the dignity and collar of Von Stroheim in Le grand illusion.  The martinet’s increasing medical armour is also evoked in Pierre Renoir’s arm-brace. Jean’s younger, wild son anticipates the girl in The Southerner. Is that hanging rabbit with the blood dripping down its whisker a forerunner of the spastic prey in the hunt in Rules of the Game? Most certainly the picnic scenes evoke A Day in the Country. For her part, the wild Andree articulates the Rules social critique of the aristocracy and is a perhaps more beautiful anticipation of Michel’s Simon’s anarchic spirit, Boudu. Here is a film that cries out for an annotated edition.

In suggesting Renoir’s sources Bourdos traces back from the films the incidents and also discussions that he may have remembered from his life. Bourdos works into his story the kind of details that Renoir might have remembered from life to transform in his work. This citing of source is implicit, loose, suggestive, like memory itself. It’s not the hard-edged folly we see in Sacha +Gervasi’s +Hitchcock (2012), where in his audition for Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins),  Anthony Perkins (James Darcy) strikes precisely the pose, posture, hand position, stammer and birdlike stare that we find in the motel scene interview. The implication is that Hitchcock didn’t conceive of the subtleties in Perkins’s Norman Bates, any of his relationships to the other material in the structure, like the theme of domineering mothers and self-denying offspring, birds, self-rationalizing, etc. He just found it all there in the anxiety-riddled actor! For a film intended to honour Hitchcock’s genius this is a jaw-dropping short-shrift. In contrast, Bourdos fills out his world with material Jean Renoir was likely to have drawn out of his life for transformation into his art. The last shot freezes the old visionary painter in another strategy to stop the flesh-eating monster Time. Renoir warms even that dark freeze frame.