Boudu Saved From Drowning Review

• 2nd Dec 2010

Given a re-release, Jean Renoir’s bourgeois comedy of manners,Boudu Saved From Drowning (Boudu Sauvé des Eaux) (1932) is shown in a newly restored print, free from any scratches and blemishes and a new fresh and remixed soundtrack – and the results look and sound pretty fresh and outstanding. Other prints I have scene are noticeably poorer by comparison. Although aware of this film, years ago I saw the very average Hollywood remake of this film first, ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills’ (1985) that runs as a straight 80s comedy, but Renoir’s original has a poetic charm as well as a caustic, very French wit too that the remake cannot match. With Michel Simon as the title character delivering one of his most memorable performances as the tramp far removed from bourgeois niceties who refuses to be turned Pygmalian like into a gentleman, despite the best efforts from a kindly gentleman, Edouard Lestingois, played by Charles Granval.

The story begins with an almost dreamlike, Cocteau-like opening, before focusing on a tramp, Boudu who searches for his beloved dog that he loses in a park. This loss takes him to the Pont Neuf Bridge, a place famed for twilight lovers, and he throws himself into the Seine only to be saved, much to the tramp’s chagrin, by a kindly bookseller. The tramp is then taken into the bookseller’s home where he is cared for, given fresh clothes and fed by his family and his maid (whom he is also having an affair with). At every turn Boudu seems ungrateful to the bookseller who encourages him to dress better and to shave off his long and straggly beard. He also disrupts the gentleman’s amours with his maid and the family fail to see why the tramp refuses to be socialised. Once scrubbed up he is encouraged at every step to be housebroken. This distance from society is revealed in an early scene in which the tramp searches for his dog and asks a policeman for help who is totally uninterested. By contrast, when a young woman searches for her missing dog, the policeman does all he can to help her (here the association of the lost dog becomes apparent as it is alluded that perhaps even a stray dog can be housebroken in this way.) Even when the tramp wins the lottery and almost joins the crowds of respectability he refuses, leading to a touching and poignant ending.

The film was directed by the undisputed master of the golden age of French cinema, Jean Renoir. Renoir was born in Provençe in the south of France in 1894 and was the son of the famous Impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. During the First World War he was left badly injured and it was only in the early 20s that he decided to turn to film making and, like his father, became a leading artist in his chosen profession. His films were both caustic in wit and light in drama – both of which are beautifully encapsulated in Boudu. He met a likeminded performer in Michel Simon. Simon was something of a vagabond himself in his youth before entering the music hall and brought much of his own experiences to his role as Boudu. He is uninterested in and has no knowledge of culture, showing disdain to the writing of Balzac and Baudeliare, much to the confusion of the bookseller. In one scene Boudu spits on a copy of Balzac’s La Phisiologie du Marriage, which itself proved to be so shocking that the Paris Police Commissioner ordered that this scene be removed from all prints as it was a “disturbance to the peace”(there was no censorship body like the Hays Commission in France at the time.) Thankfully, this has been restored for this release. Renoir himself was politically minded and he gently attacks bourgeois hypocrisy with this scene.

Boudu Saved From Drowning stands the test of time as an outstanding comedy about bourgeois manners and complacency and deserves to receive a re-evaluation. The Parisian locations are also very evocative and portray Paris, less as an urban place of alienation and more as a rural idyll in a film that is both charming and anarchic in equal measure.

Released on 17th December 2010 through Park Circus

Chris Hick