Jean Renoir

I watched two films by Jean Renoir last week: Toni (1934) and The Rules of the Game (1939). The latter, a flop at its first release, is considered to be the 'best' in cinema history, but to me while it is technically superior to his earlier works, I enjoyed Toni a lot better.

Made in 1934 on shoestring budget, Toni is a rough gem: rough both on the quality of images and the use of largely non-professional actors from the local areas; gem for it is a most delightful works with wonderful sense of rhythm, insightful depiction of human nature, and a great structure that signifies life has a pattern like season and nature. It is 'realistic' both for its use of the natural landscape resulted from location shooting, and for the rich texture of characters brought by the use of non-professional actors. And like some of his other great works of the same period, the characters are never black and white but feel as real as everyday life.

Toni, for its gritty realistic value and sense of poetry reminds me of his other two films that I love: A Day in the Country and The Grand Illusion. Both simple in structure but with great eyes on human nature, they are some of the cinematic greats. The performance in A Day in the Country by Sylvia Bataille is supremely subtle and unforgettable, with a soundtrack working like a brush in creating the mood of the film.

On a different note, Toni reminds me of the early works by a young Chinese director Jia Zhangke who, at the forefront of making gritty realistic films, was actually adopting many methods 'pioneered' by Renoir in his early career, such as working with friends and non-professional actors with strong local accents unintelligible to many, working on un-finished scripts and heavy reliance on improvisation, and location shooting. Different from Renoir though, Jia's insistence on portraying the lower class Chinese living in rural China comes both from his rebelion against the mainstream Chinese cinema and his own experience of growing up in one of the poorest regions in Western China, while Renoir's might have more to do with his artistic and intellectual interests and preference. Jia's early works (Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures) is in a sense a remake of Toni in Chinese contemporary rural context. He is yet to come up with anything as beautiful (and inspirational) as A Day in the Country, or as engaging as The Grand Illusion.