While the film is credited with bringing German Expressionism to French cinema and thus another step toward film noir, the film is notable for its sense of stillness…. (on the 2016 Criterion release)
The film concerns the sexual triad, in Renoir’s words “he, she, and the other guy.” As a violation of the heterosexual norm, the triad must necessarily end up badly, but Renoir’s profound humanism takes away the moralizing and despair of Fritz Lang’s very good remake, Scarlet Street (1945), whose very title evokes the legacy of Puritanism critiqued by Hawthorne. There is a blithe aspect to La Chienne, beginning with the little Guignol/Punch and Judy puppet show that is the prelude. The film looks on with both humor and wisdom at the folly of sexual passion, with its deceits, battles, and assorted psychopathologies, all in service of the pleasure of orgasm. La Chienne shares with films like The Blue Angel (1930) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) the idea of people misperceiving their roles in relationships, and enduring degradation for relationships that hardly even exist.
The plot of La Chienne is so familiar as to be archetypal: an aging clerk in an unhappy marriage saves a young prostitute from her brutal pimp (an encounter that has always struck me as implausible, but after all we are almost in the domain of myth), and the prostitute feigns affection for the much older man, who, flattered, begins an affair that compromises and finally ends his bourgeois respectability….
Yet the film has an innocent aura, including the scheme of Lulu’s pimp Dede (Georges Flamant) to defraud Legrand, selling his paintings under a pseudonym. While the film is credited with bringing German Expressionism to French cinema and thus another step toward film noir, the film is notable for its sense of stillness, the quiet of the Parisian streets save for the appearance of strolling musicians. Renoir conveys a civil society made turbulent by lust and sexual delusion. But La Chienne is emphatically not The Blue Angel. There is no Expressionist sturm und drang here, even as Dede is awakened in his jail cell to be taken to the gallows – his handsome face is bathed in a beatific light, although it is a quick shot, conveying a fate sealed. Legrand ends up on the street a homeless vagabond, but he is able to chuckle and give an existentialist shrug to his fate, in contrast to the last scene in Scarlett Street, with Cross alone in a black, uncaring universe, harassed by cops as he sleeps on a park bench, then shuffling down a street, haunted by voices as he is reminded of fortune and identity lost. Lang’s interpretation of Renoir has much value: it reflects a world just coming out of catastrophe, its images containing the same dour world view that inaugurated the Weimar cinema….
Read the full piece here.
Christopher Sharrett is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Seton Hall University. He is a Contributing Editor for Film International.
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 