Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) - film review

Heartbroken when he loses sight of a stray dog he has befriended, a Parisian tramp named Priap Boudu throws himself from a bridge into the river.  He is saved from drowning by respectable bookseller Edouard Lestingois.  Far from showing gratitude, Boudu persuades Lestingois that it is his duty to adopt him, a development that pleases neither Lestingois’s wife nor his maid.  Within no time, the ordered calm of the household is completely decimated as Boudu makes a nonsense of his benefactor’s attempts to civilise him.  Madame Lestingois decides the time has come for Boudu to go, but when he enters her bedroom with obvious intent she soon changes her opinion of him...

Jean Renoir’s follow-up to his Maigret mystery-thriller La Nuit du carrefour (1932) approaches the problem of France’s bourgeoisie from a completely different angle, through scurrilous farce.  Renoir’s growing sense of detachment from the bourgeois world into which he was born is noticeable across his first six sound films but attains its most vivid expression in Boudu sauvé des eaux, not only through the choice of subject, but also through the way in which the director chooses to film it.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, who had embraced the limiting conventions of Hollywood-style filmmaking, Renoir sought to develop more imaginative ways of telling a story, using long takes with camera motion instead of the more familiar technique of splicing together short static shots.   Boudu sauvé des eaux is essentially a film about the conflict between freedom and convention, so it is particularly appropriate that Renoir should employ a cinematic style, characterised by its fluidity and naturalism, that defies the conventions of the time.  Renoir’s moving camera and long takes make the spectator aware that he is an outsider, a voyeur looking in on the privileged but stifled world of the bourgeoisie from a distance.  The use of split focus and almost telescopic long shots introduces a hint of Brechtian distancing which heightens the absurdity of what we see, making this an especially virulent assault on bourgeois etiquette.

The film is based on René Fauchois’s very popular play Boudu sauvé des eaux, which was first performed in Paris in the mid-1920s.  The actor who played the part of the tramp in the original stage play was Michel Simon, who later persuaded Renoir to adapt it into a film.  Simon had by this time appeared in three of Renoir’s films - Tire au flanc (1928), On purge bébé (1931) and La Chienne (1931) - and although Renoir originally had misgivings about the project he agreed to adapt Fauchois’s play, with Simon putting up most of the finance and taking the lead role.  The film differs from the play in two significant respects - Boudu replaces Lestingois as the central character and the ending has Boudu returning to his vagabond ways rather than becoming fully indoctrinated into the bourgeois milieu.  So confident were they that the film would be a success that Renoir and Simon considered making a series of films featuring the character Boudu, although this ultimately came to nothing.  Whilst it received generally positive reviews, Boudu sauvé des eaux also provoked considerable outrage in some quarters.  The rightwing press was, predictably, scandalised by what was perceived as an anarchist assault on bourgeois values, and such hostility contributed to the film’s poor performance at the box office.  The two things that caused most offence were Boudu eating with his fingers and spitting into a first edition of Honoré Balzac’s Physiologie du Mariage (the bedroom frolics almost passed without comment, which in itself says something about the bourgeois mindset).

Boudu sauvé des eaux is arguably Renoir’s first true masterpiece, a major step forward from earlier comedies such as On purge bébé, and a foretaste of what was to come.  It was also one of his most innovative films, using real locations, camera movement and sound in a way that was well ahead of its time.  The sunny location sequences (shot on the Marne near Joinville on the outskirts of Paris) evoke the impressionistic aesthetic of the director’s father, Pierre-Auguste, and convey his keen appreciation of the beauty and harmony of the natural world, just as vividly as his subsequent films Toni (1935), Partie de campagne (1936) and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959).  The sun-drenched wide open spaces, populated by smiling carefree people, contrast with the cramped darkened interior of the Lestingois household, accentuating the sense of culture clash between Boudu and his benefactor and underlining Renoir’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie as a class imprisoned by their flawed values and their material needs.  It is logical to equate Renoir with the free-spirited Boudu, although, when you watch the director’s films of this period, you sense that he is making Boudu’s journey in reverse - gradually divesting himself of his bourgeois associations so that he can be freer, more true to himself and therefore better able to appreciate the joys and opportunities that life offers.  Renoir’s growing antipathy towards the bourgeoisie would be accompanied by an increasing engagement with left-wing politics, something that would impinge on his films in the second half of the decade.

Although Boudu sauvé des eaux is often described as anti-bourgeois, Renoir’s treatment of his bourgeois characters is actually very sympathetic.  Lestingois, the bookseller who saves Boudu from drowning, may be a hypocrite, a paternalist and something of a snob, but he is also kind, compassionate and forgiving.  Set against Lestingois’s obvious humanism, it is Boudu who appears unsympathetic, showing nothing but ingratitude to his saviour and doing everything he can to upset his household.  In a sense, Boudu is as much a prisoner of his milieu as Lestingois is.  His lack of refinement prevents him from appreciating good things (like a Balzac novel, which he uses as a handkerchief) and he does not even have the imagination to see how winning the lottery can change his life for the better.  The film may well conclude with Boudu nonchalantly returning to his former vagabond life, but by this stage Renoir has made us aware that freedom is illusory - that Boudu is as pinned to his little groove as Lestingois and his menagerie are to theirs.  Renoir’s own sympathies may be more with Boudu than with his benefactor, but he recognises that no man can ever be free.  Boudu may have the open road and the sun on his back, but Lestingois has Balzac and Baudelaire, a more than adequate compensation.  

A propos, the young poet sitting on the park bench near the start of the film is none other than Jacques Becker, an assistant director on the film who would subsequently become of one France’s great pre-New Wave auteur filmmakers.  Boudu sauvé des eaux has so far been remade twice - as Down and out in Beverly Hills (1986) by Paul Mazursky and as Boudu (2005) by Gérard Jugnot.  Needless to say, neither of these updated versions can hold a candle to Renoir’s magnificent original, which remains one of the great satirical masterpieces of 1930s French cinema.

© James Travers 2011

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