Nothing wrong with a nepo baby if they’re actually any good. La fille de l’eau (aka The Whirlpool of Fate, sometimes known as The Girl of the Water) is Jean Renoir’s first feature film, shot when he was 31, using Paul Cezanne’s property as a location and financial assistance from the estate of his own dad, the painter Pierre-Auguste (flogging one of dad’s paintings often came in handy in the early days).
What he gives us is a lyrical and beautiful film harking back to the Impressionist/Post Impressionist style of Renoir Sr, Cezanne et al and forward to Renoir Jr’s own deliciously pretty films of the 1930s. What you don’t get is much of a plot. This is the story of a sweet and innocent young girl whose life on board a barge on France’s canal system comes to a premature end when her father dies and her uncle turns out to be, as he’s described in the opening credits, a “brute”.
Escaping to avoid being raped, she is thrown on the mercy of the world, and is subjected to harsh treatment by fate, though Renoir dangles the possibility of a happy ending throughout. Or else why introduce a male character who rides around on a white horse, symbolism so in your face it’s almost comical.
Good screenwriters urge classes of would-bes to avoid “this, then this, then this” plotting, and aim for “this, so this, so this”. La fille de l’eau demonstrates why. There is no real consequence or follow-up to any of the actions of Virginia (or Gudule as she’s called in the French original, and is again in the English language Studio Canal version I watched). In one little story-lette after another, Gudule (I’m sticking with that) meets and is befriended by a poacher, comes into conflict with a rich farmer, falls into a quarry, gets feverishly sick after getting stuck out in the rain, then is rescued by well-to-do Georges, son of a bourgeois family and rider of the symbolic white steed. Happy ever after? Not quite. The brutish uncle re-enters the story, and attempts to get Gudule to start stealing from Georges’s family.
This is not top-flight Renoir by any stretch. Renoir appears to be most interested in working through a series of techniques, as if warming himself up for a future film rather than actually making one. But he clearly has what it takes. His framing is picturesque, he uses movement and its absence to dramatic effect, editing is deployed to suggest a raising of the emotional temperature and all his images are beautifully composed, a series of gauzy pastoral tableaux, precisely lit and using light and shade to great effect.
At one point, when Gudule has her fever-dream, he throws in a fantasy sequence and really goes to town on special effects – double exposure, bleaching, slo-mo, dissolves, unusual lighting, graphic overlays, trick perspective, distortion and reverse filming to name just a few.
Though this sequence isn’t really what Renoir would later be known for, the entire film’s acute attention to the small details of human character is. It’s at its best as a series of portraits of people, men really, whether it’s La Fouine (aka The Weasel) the poacher, or Justin the rich farmer, or Georges on his white horse. But it extends to minor characters too, like the thumbnails of the village mechanic or the bar owner with a toothache.
Catherine Hessling had been Renoir’s father’s life model before Renoir Jr persuaded her to marry him. I’ll make you a star, he promised, and there’s a suggestion that it was Hessling that deflected Renoir from his chosen profession – ceramics – and into the movies. He devised her look, which is an exaggerated 1920s movie-star image – massive eyes, bow lips, chalk-white make-up. She’s good at the damsel-in-distress stuff but this isn’t a movie to assess people on their acting and it’s unfair to suggest she’s unsubtle.
You’ll get a jaunty piano score by Antonio Coppola, uncle of Francis Ford, if you go for the Studio Canal disc, which is, without getting too technical, a slow OK. A bit furry, a bit bleached out in the highlights. But you can see what Renoir was about and how good he is. That doesn’t make this is a great film but it does promise great things. And they would come.
La fille de l’eau aka Whirlpool of Fate – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
