Written by Pierre Lestringuez
Directed by Jean Renoir
Starring Catherine Hessling, Charlotte Clasis, Pierre Champagne, Maurice Touzé, and Georges Térof
Runtime: 1 hour and 23 minutes
Available on Blu-ray and digitally via Kino Now

by Benjamin Leonard, Managing Zine Editor, Best Boy

Friends, there’s over a century’s worth of cinema out there from all over the world and my interests are rather far flung. So I have to admit to you that I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve gotten around to watching anything by Jean Renoir. But we all have new areas of film we can dive into. Why shouldn’t I start at (more or less) the beginning of his career? Conveniently, Kino Classics has just released a very nice 4K restoration with music composed and performed by Antonio Coppola and a Commentary track from film critic Nick Pinkerton.

Being unfamiliar with this, all I was going by was the brief synopsis Kino provided stating it was a “dreamy episodic melodrama that follows the poor girl as she endures the loss of her father, the abuse of her alcoholic uncle, and a perilous fall down a well that erases her memory and triggers surreal dreams.” So  I was expecting a pretty bleak picture mixed with some experimental filmmaking for the surreal bits. Those are there, but not as much as that description led me to believe. What surprised me is that it’s also a little sweet and very funny at times.

The film throws a lot of characters and situations at you right in the beginning and I was just at my saturation point when things settled down and got to telling its tale. The quick and dirty of it is, George is from the wealthy family around town and he's kinda sneaking a peek at Gudule, whose uncle, father, and dog are on a large houseboat with her. There's a great shot introducing her family as the boat moves through the frame and her father is walking along it but at the same speed the boat is moving, leaving him basically in the same spot for the majority of the shot. 

Anyhow, dad falls in the water right after that and dies. Gudule’s uncle is a nasty piece of shit and starts smacking her around and gets what I can only describe as a “rapey look” in his eyes. It's a brutal scene, but she and the dog escape. They are taken in by a fun, nomadic, mother and son duo known as The Bat and Weasel. These two are referred to by the pejorative “gypsy” and go about showing Gudule the tricks of the trade. 

The gang runs afoul of a well to do landowner/farmer and he chases them off and eventually totally wrecks their shit. He gets the whole town drunk and convinces them to burn down their caravan and chase them out for good. This is what leads to the fever dream sequence that I mentioned earlier. It really is splendid. The cinematic tricks used and the resulting effects are very impressive. There's only one portion where the lighting is so blown out that it becomes difficult to discern what is being shown. Otherwise, the lighting throughout the film is exceptionally impressive. It really looks beautiful. 

Left on her own, rich boy George’s family takes Gudule in. But all isn't sunshine and rainbows. Her uncle has come back to town and takes to roughing her up and robbing her. I started to think, “Why doesn't she tell people about him?” But of course, there's the shame of abuse on top of the familial shame of having such a fuckwit for an uncle. George ends up coming to her rescue and the film ends with Gudule seemingly being accepted into the wealthy family’s fold. 

The story is quite engaging and only occasionally hokey. Paired with some fun (if somewhat broad) performances, I really cared about how this played out. Sometimes sitting down to an old, silent film takes a bit of an effort on my part to overcome those so-called barriers, but I settled right into this story after the initial info dump. 

Having seen some marvelous 4K restoration from the same era, this one is sometimes a bit grainier than I’d expected. It still looks very good, but maybe temper your expectations as compared to some other 4K restorations. Obviously transfer quality comes down to what source materials are available to derive the images from, but I later noted that this edition is 12 minutes longer than what had previously been released. Because there aren’t notes regarding this particular transfer with the release, I can only assume that there was some degraded and lost footage that had been added back into the film that contributed to my take on this.

To that end, I do wish Kino Classics put a bit more into the special features of this release. A few paragraphs on the transfer and the provenance of the source material can really add to the viewer’s experience. A brief essay on the film, it’s creation, reception and legacy would also have been greatly appreciated. We are, however, provided a commentary track by film critic Nick Pinkerton that may have filled in some of these gaps. Now this is a purely personal take but, I’m just not a fan of the professorial style of commentary and I didn’t make it very far. In addition, poor Nick’s lips were regularly smacking together in a way that made it hard for me to concentrate and instead I just wanted to give him a big glass of water to help him through. Also included was a  lovely score written and performed by Antonio Coppola. Again, due to a lack of information on the release, I do not know when Coppola created this and an (admittedly brief) internet search didn’t provide me any further details.