Nana 1926

Nana is Jean Renoir's second feature, a 1926 silent adaptation of Émile Zola's 1880 novel about an actress who becomes the most sought-after courtesan in Paris under the Second Empire and ruins the men who keep her. Renoir cast his wife, Catherine Hessling, in the title role, and financed much of the film with money from the sale of paintings by his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It was a lavish Franco-German production, shot in studios in France and Germany, with sets and costumes by the young Claude Autant-Lara. It was also a commercial failure, and it held Renoir back for years. Seen today, it is a fascinating, uneven film: a key early work by a great director and a showcase for one of the strangest performances of the silent era.

The story

Nana performs in light comedies that the Parisian bourgeoisie flock to see. Her stage talent is modest; her success with men is not. She leaves the theatre and is kept in luxury, first by one admirer and then by Count Muffat, a high official at the court. A young man kills himself for her. Muffat ruins himself to pay for her caprices and her extravagant parties, while she deceives him with others. Eventually she wants to go back on stage. Not long after, she catches smallpox and dies.

Renoir's version simplifies Zola's sprawling novel and leaves out much of its social panorama, but it keeps the arc of rise and fall.

Catherine Hessling

Hessling had been one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's last models before she married his son. Her acting in Nana is not naturalistic at all: jerky, doll-like movements, wide eyes, exaggerated gestures, closer to a puppet or a dancer than to a woman of flesh and blood. Some critics found it absurd; others saw it as a deliberate stylisation that turns Nana into a mechanical toy who drives men mad. It is impossible to forget.

Werner Krauss, the German star of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, plays Muffat with heavy, tragic dignity, a striking contrast to Hessling's lightness.

The production

According to Renoir's memoir, My Life and My Films, the film cost about a million francs, not counting a large German contribution. It was shot in French and German studios between late 1925 and early 1926. Two set pieces stand out: a horse race and an open-air ball, both staged on a scale rare in French cinema of the time.

Renoir was convinced it would be a hit. When it lost money, he had to make smaller films, and it was several years before he could work on this scale again.

Why see it now

Nana shows Renoir before sound, before La Chienne and La Grande Illusion, already interested in actors, in social class and in the gap between appearance and desire. Restored copies with a score let you appreciate its sets and its odd, compelling star.

It belongs with the ambitious French silents of the decade, such as Abel Gance's Napoléon and Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent, another Zola adaptation. See more in the best French films of the 1920s.