Word: renoirs
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...JEAN RENOIR'S Little Theater is three short movies and an even shorter interlude, held together by two simple ideas: that the world is like a little theater, with conventions as arbitrary but as crucial as the conventions of comedy, and that people who love each other come out right in the end. The movies' plots and characters are as simple as these ideas, and so is Renoir's technique--perhaps partly because he made the Little Theater for the smaller screen of television, his camera generally stays focused for several minutes at a time on a few people, against...
...little stage Renoir points to at the beginning of each section fits the movie as a whole. If you almost always know what's going to happen next, it's because things follow old, classical patterns, like the Mack Sennett movies that Renoir says in My Life and My Films were "the direct expression of the dreams of the film-maker." And if you sometimes feel dissatisfied, if it seems that Renoir could film more interesting people than a woman in love with her electric floor waxer, or that not even the most charming Christmas Eve would make you enjoy...
...because it takes its reality seriously, it is complex enough to end with an ambiguity that verges on bitterness. When the tolerant, savage laughter of the villagers who were all set to ostracize the cuckold a moment before melts into their bows to the audience, it's as though Renoir is passing behond the sentiment of the rest of his movie to a cold-eyed account of it, a little like one of Wallace Stevens's poems, about a diabetic listening to the radio, that ends with "Dying lady, rejoice, rejoice." Since we've been asked to rejoice along with...
...think maybe the tone of My Life and My Films--tolerant, grandfatherly, but not overly analytic--helps account for some of the problems with the first couple of sections of The Little Theater. Renoir recalls the days when he was making a propaganda movie for the French Popular Front, say, in the same sketchy, enjoyable, anecdotal way he recalls everything else--besides its nuggets of information on how Auguste Renoir got his son to sit for portraits or what Erich von Stroheim argued about during the filming of The Grand Illusion, My Life and My Films is easy and quick...
...snow comes down gently, as it should, the Seine winds placidly in the story-book background. Some diners-out offer an old bum money to watch them eat, so as to add savor to their meal with a reminder that progress--which they like as little as Renoir does--hasn't leveled all distinctions yet. The bum pockets the leftovers from their meal, shows up some patronizing rich folks who think they know all about poor people, waltzes through an imaginary chateau with his old flame, and lies down beside her to die in the snow. It's wonderful, except...