Long thought to be a puzzling
imperfectionist who made tantalizingly flawed films, Renoir had to await
full recognition of his genius until the late Forties - after the Italian
neo-realists had demonstrated that people and passion could be more
important than technical perfection and stylistic consistency. Toni
was an exception even among Renoir's early sound films, which persistently
broke the prevailing rule of studio settings and carefully contrived
soundtracks. Much of it was shot on location, without makeup and using
directiy recorded natural sounds.
Yet although the film came to be acknowledged as a masterly forerunner
of neo-realist preoccupations and techniques, Renoir himself disagreed. 'I
do not think that is quite correct,' he wrote in My Life and My
Films. 'The Italian films are magnificent dramatic productions.
whereas in Toni I was at pains to avoid the dramatic.'
Renoir was too modest to make the point that the fatal flaw in such key
neo-realist films as Bicycle Thieves (1948) was that, in their
determination to be dramatic; to extract sympathy on behalf of the
sufferings of ordinary people, they fell headlong into the trap of
sentimentality. Toni, on the other hand, is not concerned with
wringing hearts over the tragedy it presents; it is content merely to
observe.
Based on a police dossier concerning a crime of passion that had taken
place in Les Martigues some ten years previously, Toni allows no
special pleading for its characters. Josefa is not the dewy-eyed innocent
imagined by Toni, a romantic constantly disappointed by the way life fails
to match up to his dreams. She is a full-blooded young woman, not averse
to provoking male instincts by wearing nothing under her dress or to
teasing Toni with an erotic invitation to suck the poison from a bee-sting
in her neck. She willingly succumbs to Albert. Toni, increasingly obsessed
by the now unattainable Josefa, treats Marie unfeelingly - not through
malice, but simply because she is approaching middle-age and unendowed
with a farm. Even the brutish, mean Albert is not wholly vicious (and
certainly less despicable than Gaby who leaves Josefa in the lurch after
persuading her to do his dirty work): forced to marry Josefa, inescapably
aware of her preference for Toni, Albert has never been allowed to forget
that, as a Belgian among meridionals, he is an interloper.
Renoir is constantly concerned to defuse the melodrama inherent in the
situations, often with an unexpected touch of humour. He rarely focuses on
dramatic climaxes in an attempt to milk their effect. Marie for instance,
suggests to Toni that a double wedding might be a thrifty notion. Renoir
cuts on Toni's silence to the dreary wedding of Albert and Josefa, Toni
and Marie. A fade-out then draws a veil over their impending misery, which
literally explodes in the following scene. While setting a dynamite charge
at the quarry, Toni is told by a friend about Albert's infidelities. As
they sit waiting on a hilltop for the explosion, with Toni worrying as to
what the future holds, the entire rock face slowly crumbles and falls.
The extremes to which the characters are subsequently driven (having
been symbolically intimated) may now be staged without the need to explore
psychological motivations or resort to undue dramatic techniques. Marie is
provoked into attempting suicide by a pointless yet crucial quarrel (Toni
wants to attend the funeral of Josefa's uncle - Marie sees this as an
indication of his continuing involvement with Josefa). She rows a boat out
to the middle of a lake, stops, and slowly stands up. At this point Renoir
cuts away to Toni hunting for her with increasing concern: the important
thing is not whether her suicide succeeds (she almost certainly intends it
to fail), but whether Toni will shoulder the guilt she is trying to force
on him. Similarly just prior to the murder, as Albert lashes Josefa with
his belt, the agitated tracking shots alternating with close-ups are
designed less to dramatize the scene then to illustrate the unreasoning
panic that leads to murder.
However Toni is not a shapeless mass of observed reality - in
fact it is as strictly formalized as any Renoir film. It has a circular
construction - the arrival of a batch of immigrants is repeated at the
end. This suggests that the events we have just witnessed, though
shattering to the lives immediately touched by them, have left no lasting
mark on the social milieu. Despite the exquisite location backgrounds -
the vineyards, rocky hilltops and verdant pathways surrounding the little
village - Renoir makes no attempt to impose, through visual
picturesqueness, the placid power of this Provencal backwater. Nonetheless
the fundamental structuring element is the way Renoir contrives to impose
the slow serene rhythm of Provence on each scene, so that the urgency of
passion or despair - Josefa and Toni laboriously pushing a handcart down a
leafy lane while, she tries to make him act upon his love for her, Marie
drifting across the lake to stage her suicide - is absorbed by the
tranquil, passive landscape.
From
filmsociety.wellington.net.nz
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