DVD of the Week: Boudu Saved from Drowning

In the clip above I discuss Jean Renoir’s “Boudu Saved from Drowning,” from 1932. This legend-like comic drama tells the story of a homeless Parisian—a classic, even stereotypical clochard, or hobo—who, after losing his dog and facing related indignities, tries to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine from the Pont des Arts and is rescued by a civic-minded liberal bookseller who, peering out the window of his shop on the quai, witnesses the attempt. The bookseller brings the homeless man into his home, where the ill-mannered, ill-tempered, raucous, concupiscent free spirit wreaks havoc. (It stars the hulking, expansive, carnal actor Michel Simon, for whom it was conceived as a vehicle.) Here’s Renoir, from his autobiography “Ma Vie et Mes Films” (“My Life and My Films”), from 1974:

The success surpassed all hopes. The public reacted with a blend of laughter and fury. Boudu, many years ahead of his time, presaged the hippie movement. Boudu was even the perfect hippie. In a scene where he wiped his shoes with a satin bedspread, the spectators—especially the female ones—unleashed cries of fury but they were soon won over by the antic situations and performers.

The movie was remade by Paul Mazursky as “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” starring Nick Nolte, but the latter-day masterwork that it seems to have inspired most deeply is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema,” from 1968, in which Terence Stamp plays the mysterious stranger who arrives in a bourgeois household and turns it topsy-turvy.

Much of the force of Renoir’s savage satire comes from its practical, documentary source—his visual record of the Paris of the day, which serves not as a backdrop but as an integral part of the drama. Here’s Renoir, from 1961 (as cited in “Renoir on Renoir,” translated by Carol Volk):

Excuse me for talking about the technical end, but I wanted to take advantage of the fact that Michel Simon was so real, that he was a hobo among hoboes, he was all the hoboes in the world, and it was interesting to see whether all the hoboes in the world could be absorbed by the Parisian crowd. For this kind of shot, I obtained a very long lens, the kind of lens that is used in Africa to film lions from afar. But instead of filming a lion, I filmed Michel Simon. I stationed my camera in a second-floor window, so that I would be above the roofs of the cars going by, and my Michel Simon walked on the piers, through the streets of Paris, among people who didn’t notice him. And I shot many scenes like that.

I show some of them in the clip.

P.S. Renoir’s autobiography is a good book; but his 1962 book “Renoir, My Father”—i.e., the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir—is a great one. The filmmaker obviously felt more at ease going into detail regarding the distant past than the recent one; or, being more than a decade younger, he recalled it more copiously, or recorded it more patiently. The filmmaker died in 1979, at the age of eighty-four.