Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
In the blue water and the blue firmament,
the violins sow their haunting strains
and the love vows of the sender,
ever sweeter and more tender,
hold you in love's embrace again. Song from Boudu Saved from Drowning
I have to admit that I've resisted this film for quite some time for no better reason than its title. I have the utmost respect of Jean Renoir as a filmmaker, but I figured that a film with the title Boudu Saved from Drowning couldn't be particularly weighty. This is an early Renoir film – just his third from the sound era – but it's what I would call a minor masterpiece. It's just 84 minutes long and has the feel of a short, but Renoir's wit and masterful cinematography are already fully evidence. Add to that an utterly masterful performance by Michel Simon, and you've got a delightful little gem.
Historical Background: Renoir's first feature-length sound film, La Chienne (1931), was a critical success but a commercial failure. Renoir next turned, in 1932, to an adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon, La Nuit du Carrefour. It was a mystery film and starred Renoir's brother, Pierre, in the role of Inspector Maigret. Then, later in the year, Renoir once again called upon his star from La Chienne, Michel Simon, for the title role in Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des Eaux was the French title). Simon came through with one of the great performances of the thirties, as the scruffy tramp who symbolizes freedom and anarchy in a society dominated by middleclass values and conventions.
The Story: Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval) is a Parisian book merchant with a wife, Emma (Marcelle Hainia), with whom he's a bit bored and a maid, Anne-Marie Chloe (Sévérine Lerczinska), with whom he isn't. Edouard is a literate man and a devoted humanitarian. One day, while ogling some lady pedestrians from his window, through a telescope, he spies a scraggly tramp, Boudu (Michel Simon), jumping the fence that separates the walkway from the river. Boudu's dog had just disappeared and he's lost his zest for living. Edouard rushes outside and across the street, strips off his jacket and tie, and dives into the river to rescue the would-be suicide. After hauling him from the water with the help of some bystanders, Edouard has the man carried to his house, where he administers some primitive first aid. Luckily, Boudu comes around, though he's none too pleased to still be among the living.
Having saved the man's life, Edouard is intent on also offering him aid and comfort and setting him on a pathway to a productive life. He feeds the man, even catering to his specific whims, offers him a place to sleep, dresses him in one of his old suits, and gives his best slippers. Boudu enjoys the company of his benefactor, but has somewhat more interest in his wife and the maid. He even goes to the barber for a shave after Anne-Marie Chloe promises him a kiss if he removes his beard. Although Boudu had previously kissed his dog, a smooch from the maid seems like a step up.
Wherever Boudu goes in the household, he wrecks havoc by a combination of natural clumsiness and lack of social graces. He uses Emma's best satin sheets to polish his shoes and drops a tray of dishes while trying to help the maid clear the table. One of Boudu's more annoying habits is spitting wherever he pleases, whether indoors or out. Edouard's humanitarian impulses are tested beyond their limit when he discovers that Boudu has even spat on a prized edition of Balzac! "He respects nothing," says Edouard. Boudu's presence in the household is also interfering with Edouard's secret nighttime trysts with the maid. Edouard is finally induced to agree with both his wife and the maid that Boudu will have to leave. Emma is assigned the task of delivering the bad news.
Boudu is far more interested in the beauty mark adjacent to Emma's cleavage than the family's ultimatum that she has been charged with delivering. Boudu rather easily seduces her, despite her well-practiced pretense of stuffy morality. Renoir handles the seduction scene in a manner that is both artsy and hilarious. The pair disappears beneath the camera frame as we hear Emma's verbal objections slowly melt into moans of pleasure. The camera remains focused on a painting in the background, depicting a frolicking youth playing a horn. Suddenly, we hear the sounds of a horn playing, but gradually realize that the horn is part of a brass band that is marching down the street outside, toward the Lestingois residence. The band is part of a troop that has comes to honor Edouard for heroically rescuing Boudu. Edouard's award thus becomes an honor for his self-initiated cuckoldry.
SPOILERS AHEAD! SKIP TO THEMES TO AVOID.
Boudu discovers some lottery tickets in the old jacket given to him by Edouard. Edouard lets him keep one of the tickets and, naturally, it turns out to be a winner. One-hundred thousand francs worth! Boudu is now wealthy enough to marry Anne-Marie Chloe. After the ceremony, the newlyweds float down the Seine in a small boat, along with Edouard and Emma and a few other guests. Boudu can't keep his eyes off the lilies drifting freely in the current. As he leans over to collect one from the surface of the river, the boat capsizes. The bride and the guests swim ashore but Boudu quickly disappears, emerging well downstream. There he finds a scarecrow dressed up in an old suit. Boudu casts off his spiffy three-piece suit in favor of the scarecrow's old rags and lies down on the riverbank beside an old goat. Once again, anarchy reins supreme.
END SPOILERS.
Themes: The main theme of the film is personal freedom. Boudu embodies man's desire for freedom and independence, but it is the river's current that provides the purest symbolic representation. The river's flow will not be constrained from going where it pleases and, as the song verse quoted at the opening of this review adds, neither will the currents of the firmament. Near the film's beginning, Boudu submits himself to the river's current, planning to ride it into eternity. By the film's end, he's content to let eternity wait a while longer, but he'll still ride life's currents unfettered by social constraints. Since there's a little bit of anarchist is all of us, Boudu represents that longing that is part of who we are.
Production Values: Boudu is one of those memorable film characters that only come along once in a great while. He's a loutish beggar who has perfected a policy of personal freedom, eschewing all of the expectations and niceties of polite society. He epitomizes carefree anarchy in an overly structured world. Renoir finds the perfect combination of annoying eccentricities and endearing pathos to give his tramp depth and uniqueness. There's none of the sentimentality, for example, that we learned to love in Chaplin's famous tramp. Renoir uses his tramp to expose the rigid, uptight conventions of bourgeois society. There are plenty of opportunities for slapstick in the absurd interactions between Boudu and the Lestingois household. There's a moment at the end of the seduction scene where Marcele Hainia, as Emma, and, then, Michel Simon, as Boudu, display a series of facial expressions and gestures that are so perfect that I backed up the tape and repeated the segment a half-dozen times.
The shooting of this film took place mainly on location beside the Seine in Paris. Renoir's famous deep focus camera technique was already in evidence. That technique provides the ability to keep the various characters always in relationship to one another as well as linked to their background. It provides an ideal foundation for Renoir's fundamentally humanistic orientation. Also already evident, even at this early stage in Renoir's career, are the fluid camera movements that convey his effortless, lyrical style of exposition.
Michel Simon had already starred for Renoir in La Chienne and would go on to important roles in L’Atalante (1934), Le Quai des Brumes (1938), and The Train (1965), but his performance here in Boudu Saved from Drowning was a career performance. This was the perfect vehicle for Simon and he responded with the perfect performance. He brought a raw energy to the part along with masterful comic technique. Renoir later stated of Simon's performance, "Everything that an actor can be in a film, Michel Simon is in Boudu. Everything!" It is interesting that Simon's first three great films, from La Chienne to L’Atalante, all deal to an extent with the timeless conflict between personal freedom and social responsibility. The other three principals in Boudu Saved from Drowning were excellent as well, but especially Marcelle Hainia as the mostly prim and proper wife.
Bottom-Line: The story of Boudu Saved from Drowning was remade by Hollywood, in 1986, as Down and Out in Beverly Hills, starring Nick Nolte as the bum and Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler as the up-scale couple. It was the first ever R-rated film from Walt Disney Studios. Renoir's film wasn't released in America until 1967, after having been "lost" for many years. Boudu Saved from Drowning is an utter delight. It is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 84 minutes.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:
Comedy of Manners DVD - Boudu (played by Michel Simon, who also produced the film) is a shaggy, foul-smelling tramp who is rescued from drowning by bo...More at Barnes and Noble
In an oeuvre permeated with ambivalence toward bourgeois life, director Jean Renoir speculates on the result of the abandonment of those values in BOU...More at Meijer
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