They say love becomes ephemeral in your 30s. Unlike your previous decade, it does not worth tackling for or make your life better. Now you know love is only a superficial and naive idea that actually annoys you. Yes, you may still love someone, but now it is not the only and foremost priority. Jean Renoir's three films - The Golden Coach (1952), French Cancan (1954), and Elena and Her Men (1956) - represent how much the fantasy of love is illusive in a deceptive manner.
The spectator might feel uncanny after watching all of the three films. Of the center of each of them is an attraction. In The Golden Coach, they are the viceroy's brand-new coach and a traveling theater. In French Cancan, it is the dance of Cancan, obviously. And in Elena and Her Men, the subsequent events around a general and a princess catch the spectator's eyes. Characters revolve around such attractions, and the films seem to manifest innocent love stories: love-at-first-sight, a platonic love between an old man and a young girl, rectangular relationship among three fervent men and a woman. However, these films suddenly subvert their stories after leading the audience along the ordinary romance for about 70 minutes. When the audience realizes the slight change of tone, it turns out to be too late.
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| Henri Danglard looks like an innocent show producer who suffers from the unstable financial support |
French CanCan presents a cabaret show producer Henri Danglard's rise and fall. Superficially, he and his pals are frivolous bourgeois who repeatedly keep meeting and breaking up. Danglard, who seeks and develops talents, is backed by his friend Walter. But as Danglard has a small argument with him, Walter draws back his financial support (and this does not happen only once). As an bohemian, Danglard does not get depressed and keep looking for new talents. An innocent girl Nini is one of them. After she was recruited by Danglard, she learns cancan only to witness his downfall due to her (unofficial) husband's violence on the producer in the opening event of a new cabaret, Moulin Rouge. Seeing Danglard's persistent optimism and love of art, Nini becomes his mistress and devotes herself to him. Upon the opening day of Moulin Rouge, she observes a solo singer who sang before her , behind the curtain.
Aligning herself to Danglard, she realizes the way he perceives talents. And this is assured by what happens on the backstage before the climactic cancan show. In front of Nini's dress room, the characters' tableau is divided into two sides. One is Danglard's, where everyone except Nini belongs, represents their complicity in the rules of the entertainment world. The other side is Nini's, where only she belongs. Danglard reveals what he is so blatantly, and then Nini helplessly complies to the reality. However, this scene is not the most astounding.
While Nini and her colleagues dances cancan, Danglard delves into the rhythm sitting on a armchair with a meaningful smile. Right after then, he encounters a female laborer who happens to witness him shaking his leg like a "vulgar" cancan dancer. Due to the gaze, he puts his leg down and lights up his cigar, which represents an elegant bourgeois appetite, as she disappears. Meanwhile, Nini crazily mingles around the cabaret showing her underwear and stretching her legs as other girls do. Compared to Danglard's confident and satisfactory smile, her exaggeratedly distorted laughter finalizes her demoralization. The crest of the moral downfall is manifested by the collective shots of the girls, especially the frontal ones. Row by row, they rush right to the film spectator lifting their skirts.
This evokes the spectator's compassion for her. The overall story has little sadness. Though there was an attempt to suicide, every character achieves his/her goal. Every man who wandered around Nini meets his pair, and she eventually becomes a dancer as she has wanted. Despite such happy ending, there is an uncanny feeling that comes from the low class characters' masochistic satisfaction with reality. Nini seems to be a victor, but she is actually a victim of the entertainment industry and star system. The film alludes that its temporal background, so called Belle Époque, was based on the illusive and phallocentric society, which was created and maintained by bourgeois.
While Nini and her colleagues dances cancan, Danglard delves into the rhythm sitting on a armchair with a meaningful smile. Right after then, he encounters a female laborer who happens to witness him shaking his leg like a "vulgar" cancan dancer. Due to the gaze, he puts his leg down and lights up his cigar, which represents an elegant bourgeois appetite, as she disappears. Meanwhile, Nini crazily mingles around the cabaret showing her underwear and stretching her legs as other girls do. Compared to Danglard's confident and satisfactory smile, her exaggeratedly distorted laughter finalizes her demoralization. The crest of the moral downfall is manifested by the collective shots of the girls, especially the frontal ones. Row by row, they rush right to the film spectator lifting their skirts.
This evokes the spectator's compassion for her. The overall story has little sadness. Though there was an attempt to suicide, every character achieves his/her goal. Every man who wandered around Nini meets his pair, and she eventually becomes a dancer as she has wanted. Despite such happy ending, there is an uncanny feeling that comes from the low class characters' masochistic satisfaction with reality. Nini seems to be a victor, but she is actually a victim of the entertainment industry and star system. The film alludes that its temporal background, so called Belle Époque, was based on the illusive and phallocentric society, which was created and maintained by bourgeois.
This film reminds me of contemporary idol system and furthermore, Walter Benjamin's criticism on Hollywood star system in "The Work of art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility". Though the star seems to possess all possible wealth and fame, at the same time, he/she becomes a target of public repugnance and a servant for entertainment. The recent Korean contest Produce 101 has created heated debates about teenager exploitation, but such was already alluded in Renoir's French Cancan. The only reason why the contest was distasted is not because it took advantage of the young girls but because its manner was too flagrant and clumsy compared to Renoir's depiction.
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| Diaper fashion of Girl's Day in 2001 |
But star system is not Renoir's the only and ultimate topic. Due to his subsequent unfolding of love stories, his films also evoke a pessimism of love itself.
Elena and Her Men is another example. A Polish princess, Elena (Ingrid Bergman) has a mystery power to make one's dream come true with a daisy. After meeting her in his victory parade, the adept general Rollan believes in her magical power and stops thinking autonomously. Accordingly, everyone around the princess, such as the general's advisers and his friend Henri, strives to "pimp her out" to the general. In short, this film is a slight modification of the director's previous work The Rules of the Game (1939) in a sense that it also shows the stupidity of bourgeois. But more importantly, this film represents how admiration of woman and her clout are illusively constructed by phallocentrism. The two main male leads, Rollan and Henri, ask her for love but always try to exploit her body, either in the name of the state or that of the general. It is also strange that the princess always works and moves for the male characters' needs without any hesitation. This is because of Renoir's perspective, which depicts the French citizens, even Elena, in this work almost like Fascists. The general's love becomes a national secret. It is also a way of guaranteeing the state's triumph. For this, love becomes so ephemeral and void at the end whereas all characters in the scene caress and kiss each other.
The Golden Coach is a case that makes me regard it as an afterwards story of the aforementioned stories. Its heroine Camilla (Anna Magnani) is the most powerful lady among the three films. Thanks to the histrionic setting, she enjoys her position as a dominatrix ruling both male and female characters by either her own energy or the theatrical language, if inevitable (e.g. the scene where she takes the golden coach from the viceroy). Ironically, however, her dominance suddenly ends as the curtain is drawn. It is truly worthwhile to cite her dialogue with Don Antonio, the pantaloon.
- Don Antonio:
Ladies and Gentlemen, to celebrate the triumph of Camilla over the intrigues of the court I would have liked to present to you a new melodrama in the Italian style but Camilla is still missing. Camilla! Camilla, on stage! Don't waste your time in the so-called real life. You belong to us the actors, acrobats mimes, clowns, mountebanks. Your only way to find happiness is on any stage, any platform, any public place during those two little hours when you become another person your true self.
- Camilla:
Felipe, Ramon, the viceroy disappeared gone. Don't they exist anymore?
- Don Antonio:
Disappeared. Now they are a part of the audience. Do you miss them?
- Camilla:
A little.
It is pity that her dominance only exists in the theater within the film. But this also represents the existence of women's ideal ego in cinema. As Laura Mulvey argued in her essay, a woman is supposed to project her desire to her son, who is another male, due to her absence of penis. Likewise, the above-mentioned heroines - Elena, Camilla, Nini - employ other signifiers - her men (Elena), the golden coach (Camilla), and Danglard (Nini) - to signify their dignity and existence. Like Camilla's case, women's desire is not to be inherent in themselves but to be projected externally. And love is the very device that Renoir used to disguise such conspiracy.
I do not intend to delve into the feminist ideology, but I was just sad to feel Renoir's pessimism of love, and even of all naive ideas of the world. I recently read a Facebook posting, which explicated some reasons why they do not start relationships after 30. It said that one's romantic experiences and distractions of life prevent him/her from wasting his/her energy for such high-stress low-return task. It made me depressed that Renoir, an artist who lived from Belle Époque to the two world wars to the Cold War, might have lost any belief in psychological understanding between individuals. Stories and films praise the sincere love, but how much do we know each other thoroughly? What else do we believe in other than romance?: the golden coach? Or a religion of daisy? If not, stardom and recognition? No matter how much the heroines, and we, suffer from these questions, the world looks so calm and consistent. The three films of Renoir make us stop and look back upon what we might have missed.
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