Fantasy and Elegy

By JAY COCKS

THE LITTLE THEATRE OF JEAN RENOIR

Directed and Written by JEAN RENOIR

It would be hard to ask of a movie much more than is given here: songs, laughter, a bit of heartbreak and melancholy, a mellow spirit and some gentle insight. All of it is accomplished, as well, with the openness and warmth characteristic of the work of Jean Renoir, a kind of humble Olympian in world cinema.

Working in such diverse forms as social drama, fantasy and elegy, Renoir has made nearly three dozen films since his first in 1924. Such works as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are classics whose richness and subtlety of style are undimmed either by familiarity or academic acceptability. His Little Theatre, created for French television in 1969, was his first film in more than ten years. Renoir, who will be 80 this September, has not made another since, but The Little Theatre is a fittingly graceful valedictory.

The film is divided into three stories and a musical interlude, a lilting evocation of the Belle Epoque in a song sung by Jeanne Moreau. The episodes are introduced by Renoir himself, standing next to a miniature theater whose curtain rises and falls in formal punctuation. The Last Christmas Eve, the opening episode, is dedicated to Hans Christian Andersen. The curtain goes up on a wistful tale of two beggars, an old man and his aging inamorata who pass Christmas Eve down by the Seine. It is a fragile story, easy enough to grind into sentimentality, but Renoir makes it true by conveying a poignant dignity that leaves no room for pathos.

The second vignette, The Electric Waxer, is described by Renoir as "an opera. At least, there are songs, choruses commenting on the action" --but there has never been an opera quite like this. A sort of jaunty and funny morality play about a housewife obsessed with the glories of her floor waxer, it combines the unwieldy stylizations of grand opera with the genteel hysterics of tele vision commercials. The last story, The King of Yvetot, about a man of advancing years who is cuckolded by his young wife, has the level worldliness and sensuality of a late Renoir film like Picnic on the Grass (1959).

Each episode is rendered in a distinct style. The first is a sort of soundstage fairy tale, deliberately embellished with unreal sets and effects (like an erratic snowfall). The second is done as eccentric, even surreal comedy, the third as a bucolic elegy, full of rich fields and dappled light. The vignettes, however, share a common theme. Renoir calls it "a tribute to a virtue which unfortunately has tended to disappear these days: tolerance."

Jay Cocks

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