London Cinema
Au Renoir
Duncan Fallowell
Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir Director: Jean Renoir. `L.I' Paris Pullman (100 minutes) The Paper Chase Director: James Bridge. Star: John Houseman. 'A' Odeon Haymarket (111 minutes)
Being a fastidious combination of
Alfred Hitchcock and Maurice Chevalier, Jean Renoir can almost cover his fallible moments: he was eighty on September 15. This latest film, Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir, originally made for French television in 1969, has an inclination towards over-engineering, not to say belabouring a joke, but one should perhaps be grateful that the inventions are there in the first place. 'Jacques Teti, also, comes to mind in some of the mechanically witty visual games, Walt Disney at intervals of affected sentimentality. 'The Electric Polisher' in particular (for the programme is a series of non-related anecdotes) is a case of a clenching original idea overstaying its welcome, long past all obvious conclusions have been loosed, an allegory of man versus the machine performed as an operetta in ticker-tape patois. Marguerite Cassan as the housewife who forms an attachment to a cleaning gadget gives an amusing run through electrical sensuality in polythene curlers, egged on by a singing chorus of office workers, not beautiful but at least comprehensible. In fact, each of the episodes is as comprehensible as day and night, wearing its allegorical wisdom on its sleeve as brazenly as brown owl, ingenious in device but lacking the slow leek of thrall which is necessary to hold all but sociomaniacs; one would like to be more intrigued by these very Gallic goings-on.
Another story, of a Burlington Bertie tramp and his lady wife, derived from Hans Andersen, has three distinct false endings. Almost any one of them would be more adroit than the one we have, their death in the snow, although you can appreciate the narrative's alphabetical resolution, A to Z and all stops on the way. With more span, 'The King of Yvetot' is immensely good-natured, a dainty adultery piece set warmly in the countryside where the udders never run dry and the village swelters in a garlic heat haze. So long as the weather holds, French rusticity cannot fail to be delightful, especially when the gardens ramble and are liberally adorned with statues and glasses of citron presse. One can even forgive the aesthetic blasphemy of those striped umbrellas they sell at Harrod's. Nonetheless there are occasions when Fernand Sardou, as the retired local landowner symbolising 'tolerance,' is benign to an ineffectual degree. His giggly young housemaid, who spends much, ofthe time necking in the woods with a butcher or brushing flour off her fingers and on to other people, is the one curious creation. Apart from illustrating that France,
too, has a chronic servant problem, she seems to say something about feudal freedom, that if you know your place at the social level you can do more or less what you like at the ethical level, but I could be
wrong. Jeanne Moreau occupies a belle epoque interlude all by herself and, with the bee-stung lip carrying
a tremble which by now must be involuntary, has the pace exactly right. She sings her song, then leaves the screen.
There is of course a steady, light
hand on the job which would interest admirers of the super-professionals, say, Euclid and Newton. Pleasure, when it comes, does so in a barrage of felicities. Disciples of Pope would ask for more spiritual penetration, greater consequence than the decoration of a social cliché. But Renoir is a man of terrific years and not as fast as he was. Alternatively, the lack of anything really leading to anywhere other than the completion of yet another small circle could well be symptomatic of the enlarged consciousness one would expect from such a mandarin of the derriere gat t.
The Paper Chase is, I think, a campus comedy. There are quite a lot of students in it, crazed by the Harvard Law School grading computer, victims of a system which has taken the tradition of the liberal education to the threshold of the battery farm. There is quite a lot of humour as well, some of it a bit too obvious to be funny, much of it of the nicer, sharper sort which has you on the edge of a chuckle, smirking for minutes at a stretch. Orson Welles's familiar, John Houseman, makes his acting debut playing the professor as potentate, and he is brilliant, dwarfing everything except the institution he embodies. It is a rather hard portrait of university life — the rote' lists, exam panics and rodent looks reminded me of 0 levels — but there are times when it is majestically spot-on. Beta double plus.
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