French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)

Henri Danglard: Jean Gabin
Nini: Françoise Arnoul
Lola: Maria Félix
Esther Georges: Anna Amendola
Baron Walter: Jean-Roger Caussimon
La Génisse: Dora Doll
Prince Alexandre: Giani Esposito
Oscar: Gaston Gabaroche
Bidon: Jacques Jouanneau
Coudrier: Jean Parédès
Paulo: Franco Pastorino
Eleonore: Michèle Philippe
Le Capitaine Valorgueil: Michel Piccoli
Eugénie Buffet: Édith Piaf
Yvette Guilbert: Patachou

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Michel Kelber
Production design: Max Douy
Film editing: Boris Lewin
Music: Georges Van Parys
Costume design: Rosine Delamare

The Moulin Rouge is a kind of metonymy for the Parisian Belle Époque, that period of French culture that forms the core of Marcel Proust's fiction and represents an efflorescence of the arts before the disaster of World War I, which is why the cabaret has been the setting of so many movies, including at least half a dozen that bear its name in the title. So it's entirely fitting that Jean Renoir, whose father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was so prominent a figure in the Belle Époque, should have chosen the Moulin Rouge as the setting for a film that marked his return to working in France after an exile that began in 1940. The central story of French Cancan is bogus: The Moulin Rouge was not founded by Henri Danglard, who is a made-up figure. But since he's played by Jean Gabin, the greatest of French movie stars, it doesn't really matter. Gabin gives a solidity to the character that few actors can muster. It's a lavish, riotously colorful movie, a heavily fictionalized treatment of the founding of the nightclub, and one of the best film musicals ever made. It's also a celebration of a certain kind of French insouciance about sex, a gleeful nose-thumbing at puritan moralizers.

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

The first time I saw The Rules of the Game, many years ago, I didn't get it. I knew it was often spoken of as one of the great films, but I couldn't see why. I had been raised on Hollywood movies, which fell neatly into their assigned slots: love story, adventure, screwball comedy, satire, social commentary, and so on. Jean Renoir's film seemed to be all of those things, and none of them satisfactorily. I had to be weaned from narrative formulas to realize why this sometimes madcap, sometimes brutal tragicomedy is regarded so highly. And I had to learn why the period it depicts, the brink of World War II, isn't just a point in the rapidly receding past, but the emblematic representation of a precipice that the human world always seems poised upon, whether the chief threat to civilization is Nazism or global climate change. The Rules of the Game is about us, dancing merrily on the brink, trying to ignore our mutual cruelty and to deny our blindness. Renoir's characters are blinded by lust and privilege, and they amuse us until they do horrible things like wantonly slaughter small animals or play foolish games whose rules they take too lightly. I'm afraid that makes one of the most entertaining (if disturbing) films ever made seem like no fun at all, but it should really be taken as a warning never to ignore the subtext of any work of art. Much of the film was improvised from a story Renoir provided, to the glory of such performers as Marcel Dalio as the marquis, Nora Gregor as his wife, Paulette Dubost as Lisette, Roland Toutain as André, Gaston Modot as Schumacher, Julien Carette as Marceau, and especially Renoir himself as Octave. Renoir's camera prowls relentlessly, restlessly through the giddy action and the sumptuousness of the sets by Max Douy and Eugène Lourié. It's not surprising that one of Renoir's assistants was the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. And, given my own initial reaction to the film, it's also not surprising that The Rules of the Game was a critical and commercial flop, trimmed to a nubbin of its original length, banned by the Vichy government, and after its negative was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1942, potentially lost forever. Fortunately, prints survived, and by 1959 Renoir's admirers had reassembled it for a more appreciative posterity.