Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1959)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959), Jean Renoir's first experience of making a film using television techniques, may not have been an unqualified success but it gave the director enough confidence to repeat the experiment in a natural setting rather than the cramped confines of a French TV studio.  Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe is the most daring of Renoir's late films, a bold attempt to combine traditional film editing with the multi-camera approach to filming that was universally used in television at the time.  Whilst the film is far from perfect - its technical imperfections exaggerate the shortcomings of a hurriedly written script - it does have a unique poetry and allowed Renoir one last opportunity to express his profound love of nature, as he had previously done on Partie de campagne (1936) and The River (1951).

Renoir's interest in multi-camera filming was driven by a desire to achieve a greater degree of spontaneity in his films.  By arranging five or six cameras around the set and allowing them to record a scene simultaneously he believed he could avoid the jarring discontinuity that arises with single-camera filming and thereby achieve a heightened impression of reality and a more engrossing experience for the spectator.  Because there are no recording breaks within a scene, he could include extraneous sound (such as that of a passing aeroplane), which added to the illusion of continuous action.  Recording with several cameras also gave much more freedom when editing, as there was a wider range of shots to choose from.  Another important advantage of the technique was that the film could be shot far more rapidly than using conventional methods, hence reducing the cost of production by some margin.

To set against these advantages, there are also many disadvantages, which are painfully noticeable throughout the film.  Prior to filming, each scene had to be meticulously rehearsed, by both the actors and the technicians, and this preparation brings a deadening slickness that often undermines the very spontaneity that Renoir is seeking,   The positions of the cameras had to be carefully worked out and this imposed limitations on how a scene could be played - often the actors are arranged in very unnatural tableaux, almost as if they are standing on a stage.  And because so much more film stock was used, the time taken to edit the film was considerably extended.  Today, multi-camera filming has become a rarity on both television and film, for these very reasons, although in certain situations (notably actions films) the simultaneous use of two or three cameras can achieve a very strong visual impact.

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was not just an experiment with technique; Renoir also intended it to be a generous homage to the work of his father, the esteemed impressionist painter Auguste Renoir.  Renoir claimed that the film was drenched with memories of his father, which is hardly surprising as it was filmed at his house at Les Collettes and around his favourite haunts in Cagnes on the Côte d'Azur.  There is a quality about the location filming that instantly evokes the impressionistic style of Auguste Renoir's paintings, and some shots (lingering static shots of the stunning rural setting) appear to be conscious attempts to emulate his work and allow the glorious majesty of nature to seep into the film.  What Renoir achieves is a film of exquisite beauty, an impressionistic poem that is marred only by a weak narrative and the practical limitations of filming with multiple cameras.

Not only does Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe employ the techniques used on Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier, it also deals with similar themes - the conflict between man's opposing natures, the dangers of unfettered scientific enquiry and, most crucially, what it means to be human.  The main character, Etienne Alexis (played by Paul Meurisse with his customary comedic panache), is a close cousin of the ill-fated Dr Cordelier - a driven scientist who believes, like that other great moral rationalist H.G. Wells, that mankind is better governed by brainy technocrats rather than dim politicians.  Universally revered, he is the obvious person to become the first President of a United States of Europe, and what he promises is a vision straight out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a future in which babies are made on a production line and sex becomes a sport, like fishing or hunting, merely a pastime.  In his view, human reproduction is too serious a matter to be left to amateurs.

Alexis's cold-hearted rationalism serves him well, until the day Fate (or rather, a very powerful wind machine) throws him into the arms of a rustic beauty (Catherine Rouvel at her most sensual) and instantly he yields to his primitive instincts (mirroring the transformation of Dr Cordelier into Mr Opale).  After a passionate fumble in the bushes (and some laughably suggestive shots of running water and insects), Alexis emerges as a literally changed man, to the chagrin of his frigid fiancée (a quasi-Fascist German girl guide leader) and the industrialists who have already knocked up a few baby manufacturing plants.  The plot may be absurd but it brought together two of the chief concerns of the time - just where scientific progress was taking us and what the European Economic Community (created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957) was likely to evolve into.  More than half a century on, the same concerns continue to preoccupy us, except that now we are just a few steps nearer to the Dystopian nightmare that Renoir alludes to in his film - a technocratic European superstate in which genetically selected babies become the ultimate consumer product.

The film of course takes its title from Édouard Manet's famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which scandalised French society in the 1860s.  Manet's incongruous placing of a nude woman in the conventional setting of a picnic exposed the absurdity of a bourgeois mindset which confidently asserts that civilised man has long outgrown his primitive instincts.  Renoir recreates a version of the painting in his film, in the memorable sequence in which a well-organised picnic is disrupted by a sudden windstorm and ends up as a Bacchanalian orgy.  The connection with Manet's painting has a deeper significance, however.  Like Manet, Renoir is challenging the staid conventions of his medium by attempting something radically different, an approach to filmmaking that will bring a heightened reality to cinema.  His film was certainly favourably received by most critics, and in some respects it anticipates the innovations of the French New Wave, but it is something of a cinematic cul-de-sac.  For his next (and final) film for the cinema, Le Caporal épinglé (1962), Renoir gave up experimentation altogether and returned to the old conventions, virtually remaking his most famous film, La Grande illusion (1937).

Film Synopsis

Étienne Alexis, the man most likely to be elected President of the United States of Europe, is a famous biologist who believes that society will be vastly improved if the human species is propagated by artificial insemination.  To celebrate his forthcoming marriage to the Countess Marie-Charlotte, the head of a German scout movement, he hosts a picnic in the countryside.  Unhappy at this intrusion, a shepherd plays a tune on his flute that conjures up a sudden windstorm.  In the confusion, Étienne is thrown into the arms of Nénette, an attractive young country girl who turns out to be his greatest admirer.  Tired of good-for-nothing suitors, Nénette has made up her mind to have a test tube baby and extorts from Étienne a promise to help her realise her dream.  As he heads back to his picnic party, Étienne loses his way and comes across Nénette bathing naked in the river.  He will indeed provide her with a baby, but not quite in the way she had imagined...