Film Review
With some material left over from his previous film,
Nana,
Jean Renoir decided to indulge his whim for comic fantasy in this bizarre short
film which defies any attempt at rational interpretation. The film was intended
as a surreal tribute to jazz, which Renoir claimed to have just discovered when he made
the film. With a blacked-up lead character and clumsy erotic dances from a semi-nude
Catherine Hessling, the film manages to push back the frontier of bad taste by several
leagues, but Renoir's humanist treatment of his subject - to say nothing of his bizarre
imagination - makes the film an interesting and oddly entertaining curiosity.
© James Travers 2003
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Next Jean Renoir film:
La Petite marchande d'allumettes (1928)
Film Synopsis
It is the year 2028, not so long after the world was ravaged by a cataclysmic
war. A tiny spherical aircraft takes off from central Africa and heads
towards Europe, a continent devastated by war. The strange craft lands
on top of an advertising column in the centre of what remains of Paris, now
a wasteland showing little sign of life. Living inside the column are
two of the city's last remaining survivors - a scantily dressed young woman
with flowers in her hair and her pet monkey. They greet the new arrival
- a smartly dressed black man - with amusement and the woman breaks into an
impromptu dance. The dapper explorer is delighted to be reacquainted
with the dance of his distant ancestors - the Charleston. He watches
spellbound as the exotic siren thrusts her arms and legs about in a display
of wild abandon.
So impressed is the explorer by the woman's performance that he offers himself
as her next meal if she will repeat the exhibition for him. The dancer
declines, saying that she never eats black meat. She ducks inside the
column and sketches the outline of a telephone on the inside wall with a stick
of chalk. A real telephone then magically appears and the woman receives
a phone call from a female operator, in the form of a woman's head floating
in the air on a pair of wings. Realising that the call is not for her,
the dancing woman hands over the phone to the explorer, who enthusiastically
reports that he has discovered the Charleston, the traditional dance of the
white people. Eager to learn the dance for himself, the explorer asks
the woman to teach him it.
Watched by a strange assembly of winged disembodied heads in the sky, the
explorer begins his lesson in earnest and, following his teacher's example,
he soon discovers he has rhythm not only in his feet but in every part of
his anatomy. Even the monkey is impressed. But whereas the wild
dancing woman appears to be indefatigable, the explorer soon grows tired.
Completely exhausted, he climbs back into his aircraft, followed by the woman
he has now befriended. As the aircraft ascends into the heavens, heading
back to Africa with its precious cargo of white culture, a tearful monkey
is left behind in the deserted capital, waving a sad farewell with its handkerchief.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.