Boudu sauvé des eaux (2010 Pathé restoration)

Jean Renoir: Boudu sauvé des eaux (FR 1932). Michel Simon as Boudu.

22.00 Piazza Maggiore

Boudu salvato dalle acque. FR 1932. PC: Les Films Sirius / Michel Simon Productions. P: Michel Simon. D: Jean Renoir. Starring Michel Simon. 84 min
A restored version that includes scenes that were cut in the original. Pathé (2010) in association with L'Immagine Ritrovata and Digimage.
Digital projection from a 2K digital intermediate from the camera negative.
Presenta Jean Douchet.

I watched only the beginning from the last row on the piazza, already getting tired. From the distance the image looked bright and sharp, but a friend who had seen it from a closer distance commented on the video-like quality with the vibration missing from Jean Renoir's plein air comedy. - Another friend who had seen this in Paris applauded the nitrate look of the experience. - Yet another friend commented that the image had an unconvincing nitrate imitation look.

In the catalogue the duration of this film is announced to be 84 min but the version released in Finland in 1971 was 86 min. But maybe the catalogue information was not accurate, and the new restored version is longer.

...

BOUDU SAUVÉ DES EAUX

Francia, 1932 Regia: Jean Renoir

T. it.: Boudu salvato dalle acque; Sog.: dalla commedia di René Fauchois; Scen.: Jean Renoir, Albert Valentin; F.: Marcel Lucien; Mo.: Suzanne de Troeye, Marguerite Houllé Renoir; Scgf.: Jean Castanier, Hugues Laurent; Mu.: Johann Strauss (Le Beau Danube bleu), Jean Boulze (flauto), Édouard Dumoulin (organino), Léo Daniderff (Les Fleurs du jardin chaque soir ont du chagrin); Su: Igor B. Kalinowski; Int.: Michel Simon (Boudu), Charles Granval (Édouard Lestingois), Marcelle Hainia (Emma Lestingois), Sévérine Lerczinska (Anne Marie), Jean Gehret (Vigour), Max Dalban (Godin), Jean Dasté (studente), Jacques Becker (poeta), Georges d’Arnoux (invitato alle nozze), Régine Lutèce (passeggiatrice), Jane Pierson (Rose, la vicina), Geneviève Cadix (ragazzina); 

    Prod.: Michel Simon per Les Films Sirius / Michel Simon Productions; Pri. pro.: 11 novembre 1932. 35 mm. D.: 84’. Bn. French version.

Da: Pathé. Restoration that includes scenes that were cut in the original, done by Pathé in association with the laboratories L’immagine Ritrovata (Bologne) and Digimage (Paris).

Boudu sauvé des eaux is a film dominated by a body, the solid yet light one of the talented Michel Simon, alias Boudu the tramp, who possesses the catastrophic vitality of a child paired with a boundless sexual appetite. Saved from drowning to death through the generosity of the bookseller Lestingois, a middle-class bon vivant, and given hospitality at his comfortable home on the Seine embankment, Boudu returns the favour by disrupting the peaceful rhythms of daily life, ruining Lestingois’ affair with a young housemaid and spitting on the pages of a rare edition of Balzac’s Physiologie du Mariage.

His relationship with things and their value, with rules in good manners and courtesy, is based upon blissful and animal-like indifference, and his presence in the house brings with it filthiness, disarray and chaos. Boudu is the embodiment of an anarchic corporality that is not in the least reassuring. He is indifferent to gratitude and propriety, yet does not lose his childlike innocence even when taking advantage of Mme. Lestingois, who has been neglected by her husband for some time. After the disaster of La Chienne, Renoir attacked middle-class marital order with undaunted and devastating irony, filming with a freedom and lightness that heralded the approaches found in the Nouvelle Vague (also in the choice of real outdoor settings). The story was inspired by a successful play by René Fauchois, overturning however its entire meaning: as a matter of fact in the original Boudu let himself be tamed to middle-class life, while in the film he capsizes the boat he was crossing the Seine on with the wedding party, making them fall in the water and returning to his freedom as a vagrant.

Fauchois cried out that his work had been distorted and the Paris Prefect of Police requested that some scenes be cut. Renoir and Simon (also producer of the film) refused and the movie was temporarily banned. Nevertheless, the fuss was good for its commercial success. Michel Simon had performed in the play on stage and it was this actor who inspired Renoir to make the film: “It was like lighting out of the blue – I saw Michel Simon in the tramp’s shoes... Simon wasn’t simply a vagrant among the others, he was all the vagrants in the world." Roberto Chiesi