Toni (1935)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

A great deal has been made of the part that Jean Renoir's 1935 naturalistic melodrama Toni played in the development of the neo-realist film.  Made almost a decade before neo-realism began to make its mark on Italian cinema - through such seminal works as Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943), Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946)  - Toni certainly looks like a trailblazer, possibly the first film of the sound era to fully embrace the neo-realist aesthetic.  The film was shot entirely on location in the south of France - Martigues, Bouche du Rhône to be precise - with the supporting cast made up of ordinary people living in the area.  None of the actors wears make-up and each speaks in the local dialect.  Deep focus, wide-angle lenses are employed to bring a near-documentary realism to the film and stress the importance of the location in the story.  The only sound that is heard is that which is directly recorded - none of the dialogue is dubbed and there is no score.  Whilst Toni undoubtedly did influence the Italian neo-realists (directly in the case of Visconti, as he was an assistant on the film) and subsequent filmmakers (notably the directors of the French New Wave), it was not the first film to employ these naturalistic techniques.  There are several silent films which exhibit the characteristics of neo-realism - for example, Jean Grémillion's Maldone (1928), Léon Poirier's Verdun, visions d'histoire (1928) and Jean Epstein's Finis terrae (1929).  Even Renoir's earlier film La Fille de l'eau (1925) has a neo-realist flavour to it.  It can be argued that Toni hardly counts as a neo-realist film, since its subject matter is sensationalist melodrama, not an authentic representation of ordinary life.

What is perhaps more interesting about Toni is what it reveals about its director.  The film marked a significant point of departure for Jean Renoir, representing the beginning of a short phase in his career in which left-wing political concerns would impinge heavily on his art.  In his previous sound films, Renoir had been exclusively concerned with the problem of the bourgeoisie, mostly in a light-hearted satirical vein, e.g. On purge bébé (1931) and Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932).  By the mid-1930s, Renoir was becoming far more politically aware, and far more effusive about the virtues of socialism.  At the time, the greatest fear that the majority of French people had was that their country would go the way of Germany, Italy and Spain and end up as a Fascist totalitarian state.  The Great Depression had recently hit Europe like a tsunami and amidst the ensuing social, political and economic turmoil, it was widely felt that democracy had had its day.  The one hope to counter this dismal prospect was an uncomfortable alliance between the socialists and the communists. Renoir, a man of strong egalitarian principles, was one of many who believed that the age of the proletariat had come, born in the dying embers of capitalism and the only alternative to Fascism.  Although this would be far more evident in his subsequent films - Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), Les Bas-fonds (1936), La Grande illusion (1937) and La Marseillaise (1938) - Renoir's sudden abandonment of bourgeois concerns is apparent in Toni.  This is a film which is set entirely in a working class milieu, with characters who are, without exception, the epitome of the hard-up proletarian (to the point of caricature in a few cases).  Renoir's decision to go for extreme realism instead of a more conventional cinematic style came from a desire to represent the miserable lot of the rural working class as accurately as possible, to avoid any of the stock-in-trade artifices that might betray the director's own bourgeois associations.

In developing his own realist aesthetic, Renoir was influenced by another notable French director of his time, Marcel Pagnol.  An innovator in his own right, Pagnol had taken the unprecedented step of creating his own production company and filming all of his films out of doors, in the countryside around Marseilles.  Pagnol was not himself an advocate of neo-realism; he used the Provençal setting merely as a kind of outdoor theatre in which to recast the plays he had previously written for the French stage.   The only one of Pagnol's films which could be legitimately termed neo-realist is Angèle (1934), although even this has its naturalist edge blunted by the director's penchant for flowery prose and theatrical staging.  Like Pagnol, Renoir was eager to shoot an entire film in a natural setting, but he wanted to go much further in his imitation of life.  He believed that the way to get to the inner truth of his protagonists was by pushing film naturalism to its absolute limit, to show life in all its ugly brutality.  When he was shooting the film, Renoir actually went further than he perhaps should, with the result that two sequences had to be cut for reasons of good taste - one showing Josepha being savagely raped by Albert, the other showing Toni pushing Albert's dead body in a cart.  Censorship was just one of the restrictions that prevented Renoir from achieving his desired aims.  Neo-realism itself presented immense artistic limitations, and these would ultimately cause the director to abandon this approach and instead embrace a more stylised kind of cinema, one in which poetry, humour and realism could be combined to give a far more satisfactory result.

It was through Marcel Pagnol's production company that Toni was financed and distributed, so we should not be surprised to see several of Pagnol's acting associates in the film.  The lead role (Toni) was given to the relatively inexperienced actor Charles Blavette who had previously appeared in a few of Pagnol's films - incredibly, the actor who was originally proposed for the part was Fernandel.   Other notable Pagnol collaborators, Edouard Delmont and Andrex, provide the film with its most polished performances, whilst the less experienced actors struggle to make their characters believable.  Perhaps more interesting than Toni is the villain of the piece, Albert, superbly played by Max Dalban.  The film makes a great deal more sense when you realise that Albert and Toni are mirror images of each other (dare we say the two opposing facets of Renoir himself?).  Whereas Toni is undemonstrative, good-natured and pretty gormless (a sucker in more ways than one), Albert is extrovert, smart and unremittingly bad (his favourite pastimes include drowning kittens, being rude to foreigners and knocking up women).  Both characters are victims of personality flaws which are magnified by their inability to cope with the culture clash that confronts them.  Just as the overtly racist Albert is destroyed by his cruelty, so the insecure immigrant Toni will find that his goodness is his downfall.  The film's crime passionel (which incidentally is based on a true story) appears to be an inevitable consequence of the racial tensions that exist between the migrant workers who are looking for a better life and the native French labourers who fear that their jobs and their women will be snatched from them.  How does the old song go?  Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras, égorger vos fils, vos compagnes...

Both Renoir and Marcel Pagnol had high hopes for Toni, but their confidence proved to be misplaced.  The film was one of Renoir's biggest flops (it barely attracted 100 thousand spectators in its first six months of exploitation), in spite of some very favourable reviews.  The problem was not that the film was bad (today, it is widely considered one of Renoir's achievements) but that it simply did not accord with the cinema-going tastes of the time.  What most motivated audiences to go to the cinema in the 1930s was the prospect of escape from real life, not a perverse desire to see real life blown up and projected onto a large screen in front of them.  The bitter travails of the 1940s made it even more difficult for realistic dramas to find an audience.  It can be argued that it was the failure of French cinema to embrace neo-realism (or indeed any kind of realism) in the 1950s - the one notable exception being Paul Carpita's Le Rendez-vous des quais (1955), possibly the best example of neo-realism à la française - that led to the French New Wave and a sudden resurgence of interest in naturalistic filmmaking.  In any event, Renoir seemed not to have been too perturbed by the public's reaction to Toni.  If anything, this setback encouraged him to persevere in his daring experiments with style and form, motivated by a simple desire to capture on film the exquisite truth of life - to achieve with the camera what his father, the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had accomplished with the paintbrush.  Imperfectly hewn oddities like Toni with their fleeting moments of brilliance were to be essential stepping stones towards Jean Renoir's greatest films.

Film Synopsis

In the early 1930s, Toni, a young Italian labourer, arrives in France and finds work at a quarry.  His landlady Marie takes a liking to him, but he is only interested in another woman, Josepha.  When the latter is raped by Toni's thuggish foreman Albert, she must reject Toni and instead marry Albert.  Toni has no option but to take Marie as his wife, although it is soon apparent that they are ill-matched.  After attempting suicide, Marie becomes hostile towards Toni and drives him away.  Josepha's marriage to Albert proves to be just as disastrous.  Tired of being bullied and beaten, Josepha plans to run away with her cousin Gabi.  The latter coerces Josepha into stealing Albert's money whilst he is asleep.  Albert awakes before his wife can make her escape and takes his revenge by thrashing her with his belt.  In the heat of the moment, Josepha picks up a gun and shoots her husband dead.  Toni offers to dispose of the body, but in doing so he inculpates himself as Albert's killer...