Jean Renoir has been called a lot of things: secular saint, father of the French New Wave, the greatest of European directors, et cetera. In 2008, Peter Bogdanovich, in an article for the Observer, called him “The best director, ever.” As much has been made of Renoir’s transcendence as of his humanism, but part of what makes his work so captivating for me is that his humanism is precisely not a grand, universalizing, triumphant humanism, but is of a rather inauspicious and quotidian variety. To this extent, I feel more comfortable proclaiming that it is less that his films are humanist than that his characters are profoundly human. Disarmingly, vitally human. I do not mean that they are “flawed” (the usual unimaginative shorthand implied by “human”) but that they are believable in a way that reminds one that the usual believability of cinematic characters is itself an achievement wrought through our collusion with cinematic conventions and the suspension of disbelief (a collusion I find increasingly dishonourable as screenwriting becomes increasingly shitty). They do and say things that we do not as film viewers expect them to do or say, but that make them seem more human, less clever fictional constructs. This in turn produces the suspicion that they may actually live on in their worlds without us, rather than live only in and only for the film and its duration. This, at times, produces an erratic quality to Renoir’s films that is familiar because it evokes something of the churning irrelevancies of a real, live human life, while remaining entirely within the strictures of narrative filmmaking.
There is a striking scene in La Marseillaise, Renoir’s 1938 film about the French Revolution (coyly subtitled A Chronicle of Certain Events Relative to the Fall of the Monarchy) where, well into the insurrection and with the storming of the palace close in the offing, Marie Antoinette enters a room to find the king eating a dish of tomatoes:
Marie Antoinette: My lord, you’re eating in spite of the circumstances?
Louis XVI: Why shouldn’t I? The stomach is an organ which ignores political nuances. I asked for tomatoes. People have been talking a lot about this vegetable since the people from Marseille have arrived in Paris. I wanted to try it. Well, Madame, do you want to know what I think of it? It is an excellent dish, and we were wrong to disregard it.
No additional context is provided for the meaning of this exchange, save that in an earlier scene we hear the men from Marseille (volunteers in the revolutionary army) asking for tomatoes at a restaurant. Modern audiences might not realize that tomatoes at the time were hardly considered a food across much of France (as well as England, Canada, and the United States), in spite of their being consumed widely in the Midi, as well as in Spain and parts of Italy. Popular opinion, or at least popular aristocratic and botanical opinion, long had it that tomatoes were probably poisonous, and at the very least disgusting. Their association with the hot-blooded republican peasantry sporting their red Phrygian caps made the tomato a fine revolutionary icon, an association strengthened by the influx of tomato-eating Southern maniacs into Paris in July of 1792.
And so, in this scene we are given to enjoy what passes as both a genuinely human moment and what might seem testimony to the utter cluelessness of the king in his royal isolation. Or, taken another way, as a signal of the king’s growing cognizance of the political forces that are set to overtake him. Certainly, the ability to take a moment amidst the tumult to enjoy a nice mesal is symbolic of the corruption and complacency of the monarchy, indeed the entire ruling class. But the look of what might be defiance, admonishment, even suspicion, that he darts at his wife as he utters this last “Ils sont un met excellent, nous avons eu tort de les négliger” is perfect, and intimates that he is speaking of something greater than an error of taste. He’s talking about taste, he’s talking about tomatoes, he’s talking about the revolution, he’s talking about hunger, but we are not beaten over the head with it.
La Marseilleise is a pretty triumphant film; it’s about liberté, fraternité, and égalité more than it’s about Robespierre and the Terror, but I want to resist saying it’s a political film in the usual sense. Okay, it is definitely a political film, definitely an ideological film, in the way it chooses to bring to us the emancipatory message of the French Revolution through the activities and accidents of the average dopes on the street, rather than focusing only on the big historical figures. But it is not one that attempts too neat or seamless a hegemonic effect. It is nuanced, and there is a friendly irony; the story, underneath all the songs and slogans, is, like the people who populate it, too complicated. In “Renoir and Plotless Cinema,” Jonas Mekas writes:
Renoir’s people look like people, act like people, and are confused like people, vague and unclear. They are moved not by the plot, not by theatrical dramatic climaxes, but by something that one could even call the stream of life itself, by their own irrationality, their sporadic, unpredictable behavior.1
“The awful thing about the world,” observes Renoir, speaking through the character Octave, whom he himself plays in La Règle du jeu, “is that everyone has their reasons.” This is not the Reason of the Renaissance, brimming with liberatory promise. The genius of Renoir’s humanism is not the exaltation of these or any particular reasons, but that he makes a virtue of acknowledging them. That virtue, I suppose, is sympathy.
1 The Village Voice, July 1961.