French Can Can – 1954, Jean Renoir

 

by Allan Fish

(France/Italy 1954 103m) DVD1

Aka. Only the French Can

Tobacco, sheep and roses

p  Louis Wipf  d  Jean Renoir  w  André-Paul Antoine  ph  Michel Kelber  ed  Borys Lewin  m  Georges Van Parys  art  Max Douy

Jean Gabin (Henri Danglard), Françoise Arnoul (Nini Olympe), Maria Félix (Lola), Jean-Roger Caussimon (Baron Walter), Anna Amendola (Esther Georges), Dora Doll (La Genisse), Giani Esposito (Alexandre), Franco Pastorino (Paulo), Michel Piccoli (Captain Valorgeuil), Philippe Clay (Casimir), Lydia Johnson (Mme Guibolle), Edith Piaf,

Much has been made of the comparison between Jean Renoir’s exquisite billet doux to the Montmartre of his father and the eponymous show palace of Baz Luhrmann’s revisionist Moulin Rouge.  Essentially, Jim Broadbent and Jean Gabin are playing the same person, but you can forget all thoughts of comparison, because Renoir’s film was always looking back, and encouraging his audience to do the same.  Even then few in his audience could recall the real Moulin Rouge, they knew it mainly through the art of Toulouse-Lautrec and through the numerous reincarnations of that immortal dance to Offenbach.  Renoir had been there before, of course, with his 1926 silent of Nana, and the period had also been evoked in his sublime Une Partie de Campagne.  Partie had evoked the outdoors of the French countryside so beloved of his father and the Impressionists, where Can Can revels in the theatricality of the infamous pleasure dome with its iconic windmill façade.   

            Appropriately the plot is a flimsy one, centring around Danglard, the middle-aged theatrical impresario who’s been through more women and more enterprises than he has shirts.  His current squeeze is exotic dance specialist Lola, who has numerous other admirers, including Danglard’s principal backer, Baron Walter.  When Danglard takes an interest – at first purely professional – in a pretty young laundress, Nini, and tries to make her the principal attraction in a new revamp of the old cancan for his newly acquired theatre, Lola throws the proverbial fly in the ointment, and ensures the jealousy of Nini’s baker’s son lover Paolo.  Eventually, Danglard and Nini becomes lovers, but at the expense of their enterprise, doomed until a love-struck foreign prince comes along.

            The photography by Michel Kelber is so exquisite as to seem like the old Impressionist masters brought to life, and the sets have a delicious artificiality that evoke Montmartre through the rose-tinted spectacles of memory.   Danglard is an institution of a character, an ageless but paradoxically ageing Casanova flitting from one delectable bird’s nest to another.  A man fascinated not by women per se, but by the public presentation of his vision of femininity.  Much wreckage is left on the wayside, principally in the guise of Esposito’s hauntingly lovesick prince and Pastorino’s big-baby jealous lover, but the principal pain is given to the women.  There’s the imperishable Félix, queen of Mexican cinema, who’s a delight from start to finish, with her voluptuous figure barely contained in period negligees and a tantrum of Callas proportions seemingly always ready to burst forth.  Gabin, reunited with Renoir two decades after their immortal thirties collaborations, is as iconically stylish as ever; even in his fifties, he can pick and choose his girl, but let’s remember him as he is at the end, recalling Warner Baxter in 42^nd Street, tapping along to the music of the dancers from his prop throne backstage.  Yet if I remember it for anyone above all, it’s the lovely Arnoul, previously seen in states of semi-undress as young sluts in Forbidden Fruit and La Rage au Corps, but here both vivacious and achingly tender under Kelber’s caressing lens, the colour bringing a flush to her cheeks and her sad eyes seemingly predicting her ultimate romantic disappointment.  But then, as Broadbent’s variation on Danglard knew, she also knows “the show must go on.”  And what a show it is, the exhilaration of the final cancan rarely matched on film.  It’s what everyone remembers it for, but in truth, it’s merely the garter on the dancer’s stocking.  Admire the whole delectable leg, Messieurs, and of course the faces.  Those lovely faces.