La Chienne. It translates as The Bitch, literally. But if it ever goes by an English title it’s usually Isn’t Life a Bitch?, which kind of misses the point.
It was made by Jean Renoir in 1931 in France and then remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood in 1945 as Scarlet Street, with Edward G Robinson and Joan Bennett in the lead roles.
Here it’s Michel Simon who plays the silly old duffer, Maurice, who falls for a prostitute, without realising what she is, and is then systematically cleaned out by her and her pimp. Foolish Maurice on one side, cool, calculating Lulu making the big eyes on the other, with Dédé the pimp in the wings pulling the strings.
It’s the same story in both La Chienne and Scarlet Street, though the later film is far less upfront about what its female protagonist actually does for a living.
For all the overt references to sex in Renoir’s original film, it’s altogether more poetic than Lang’s slightly more muscular reworking, though really there’s not that much to separate the two in terms of plot. Lang’s isn’t better, just different, which is maybe why Renoir didn’t go a bundle on it.
Another reason is that maybe the remake stirred up bad memories. In a case of life imitating art, Renoir’s star, Simon, fell for the leading lady, Janie Marèse, while they were shooting. But she only had eyes for Georges Flamant, who played Dédé the pimp. Shortly after filming wrapped, Flamant took Marèse out for a spin in a car he couldn’t actually drive. She died in a car accident that day. At the funeral Simon, distraught, pulled a gun on Renoir, blaming him for Marèse’s death.
But back to the movie, a brilliant example of Renoir’s style – simple, spare but with a fluid camera that many sound pictures of this era could not match. Its look is noir before noir, with so many images of lyrical darkness. A lot of it is set at night. The sound isn’t post-dubbed, either, which is unusual. At one point, as Lulu and Dédé dance, the camera comes off the tripod and Renoir follows the couple across the dancefloor.
Incidental characters are drawn in pungent strokes. Maurice’s horrible, shrewish wife (Magdeleine Bérubet), a harridan of the first water who never tires of telling Maurice how inadequate he is compared to her first husband, who died in the First World War and whose picture hangs in their apartment.
The story dives up some unexpected avenues. No spoilers, apart from to say that Maurice’s hobby as a Sunday painter suddenly turns into something more pivotal when his paintings start selling for big bucks, allowing Jean Renoir, son of the famous artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to get in some good satirical digs at the art world.
It’s a story of the humble being exalted and the exalted humbled, at a cosmic level at least, with the whole thing introduced by a French Punch and Judy show – knockabout justice is what’s on offer there too – and bookended by Maurice, now living on the streets, laughing about what’s happened to him with a new friend, whose identity it would be cruel to reveal.
“You lick the hand that feeds you and the hand that beats you,” Maurice complains to Lulu at one point, when he realises, finally, what she’s all about and what’s going on. Hence a “chienne” – a female dog.
It’s a strange film because everyone in it, no matter how awful (Maurice’s wife), or craven (Lulu) or morally abject (Dédé) gets a moment when we feel sympathy for them. Renoir gives us their interiority. That’s also unusual for films of this era, which go for surface rather than depth.
And talking of surface, the look of this film is superb. It got a 4K restoration in 2014 which is the basis of the 2016 release by Criterion, which is the one to seek out. The sound is a touch tinny still but if you’re not French-speaking you’ll be watching with the subtitles on anyway, and the image more than compensates. In any case it’s such a good film it’d be worth watching whatever the state of the image.
La Chienne – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
