Word: films
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CRITICS HAVE accurately called Toni a neo-realist film eleven years ahead of its time. In a decade of pictures made in studios, it as shot entirely on location in the Midi, using local inhabitants as well as professional actors. I feels completely true to the environment and lives of immigrant French peasants. As Richard Roud puts it, "Renoir's ambition was that the public should imagine that an invisible camera had filmed various phases of a Crime passionel without the human beings involved in the action having noticed...
THERE ARE in fact two basic sorts of shots in the film. The first, described above, shows the land alone or with figures integrated into it, part of its order. The second is a close shot of one or more people, showing little more than their faces. The dramatic function of the long shots is to show people carrying out these close-shot decisions. Given he strength and singleness of their human passions, the long shots have a quality of fatality. This quality accounts for the film's feeling of determinism, of lack of choice, as the drama proceeds...
This feeling and form of a closed work, a film completely created, extends also to the plot. The plot sets one character--the most passionate, the artist--against his mileau (land and other characters). As fixed in his passion and character a they in theirs, he is doomed: his actions will cause his destruction. We see him in the hero of Boudu Sauve des Eaux, in the heroine of Petite Marchande d'Allumettes and of Madame Bovary, in Batala of Le Crime de M. Lange, in the aviator of La Regle du Jeu. Renoir expresses the fixity of the particular...
...plot is circular: the world is unchanged, a character is dead--but our understanding of the milieu (characters and setting) has been amazing enlarged. The end of Toni repeats the first shot and it is frightening. Filled with an incredibly strong feeling of the world of film--a feeling almost of aesthetic passion--we are unable to act. This closed world, Renoir's creation, is fixed...
...rate, he certainly doesn't aim Shame at our minds, but instead succeeds in an overall effect. Making a non-intellectual film he has at last fused his talents as writer and director, and simultaneously bridged the space between his screen and his audience. Still, many of the devices he uses are vintage Bergman. Gaunt Max von Sydow, for example, plays the archteypal Bergman male--weak and childish, incapable of even killing a hen for supper, leaning on Liv Ullman, his strong loving wife (much like Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck in a happier film, Smiles of a Summer Night...