La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast)
A film by Jean Renoir
1938/ France / 100
minutes
22nd June
2014; 5.45 pm ; Perks Mini Theater
Emile Zola piles on the melo in his drama of murder and
infidelity on the railways while Jean Renoir captures the intensity of emotion
involved in working with steam engines. The combination of these two creative
giants is as dark and electric as a thunderstorm at midnight.
Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) is a manic depressive, with
violent tendencies whose love of the train he drives surpasses everything –
until he meets Severine (Simone Simon). Severine is married to Roubaud (Fernand
Ledoux), the assistant station master at Le Havre. Then begins the love triangle that leads to the disastrous
end.
Roubaud is much older, a company man to his fingertips, unaware of his
wife’s “difficult” childhood and previous sexual encounters with her mother’s
employer, a philandering aristocrat. Roubaud becomes jealous and angry when he
comes to know about this.
Renoir invokes the camaraderie and pride of railwaymen in
the years before union strikes and diesel, while ensuring, as with all his
films, that the supporting roles are well-equipped with humour and humanity. The
film is a study of guilt as it’s all centered around two men and a woman in
this world of murder and adultery. The script works as a study of guilt and
motivations yet it’s in Renoir’s direction where the film really takes hold.
Opening with this amazing, five-minute montage of a train speeding throughout
the French countryside, Renoir manages to keep the film pretty straightforward
while his compositions are very striking in the way he creates love scenes or
some intense, dramatic moments.
(Source:Internet)
JEAN RENOIR
Son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste, Jean
Renoir had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir
was his nephew. After the end of World War I, where he won the Croix de Guerre,
he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married Catherine Hessling, for
whom he began to make movies; he wanted to make a star of her. His next partner
was Marguerite Renoir, whom he never married, although she took his name. He
left France in 1941 during the German invasion of France during World War II
and became a naturalized US citizen.
As a director and actor, he made more than forty films from
the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive
biography of his father, Renoir, My Father (1962). Renoir exerted immense
influence on subsequent auteur directors, including among others Orson Welles,
Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut. Best remembered for such cinematic
landmarks as Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Renoir is
considered one of the major figures of French and international film history.
Renoir's films were underestimated when they first came out.
They were unconventional, complex, and so energetic and technically daring that
few noticed their intricate structure. They were often dismissed as rough, not
fully achieved artistically. The generation that came to the cinema in the '60s
and '70s (perhaps the richest and most diverse era in European cinema)
recognised Renoir as an ancestor who had already made the kind of films they
admired or were setting out to make themselves, and justly hailed them as
masterpieces.
