El crimen de Monsieur Lange

Delightful! I'm a great fan of Jean Renoir, and I was very pleased to see this early piece as part of the excellent boxed set of 3 now available on DVD. It has its faults, but I love the way that he lets his actors "do their thing" and lives with the resultant somewhat chaotic mis en scene. The characters are great, with Jules Berry outdoing every caddish scoundrel I've ever seen on film (even including Terry -Thomas!). There's so much fun evident in the making of it, the rather slight fairy-story plot fills the bill perfectly, so it's like watching an early Hitchcock like "Young and Innocent". Lots of the same sense of fun finds its way into Renoir's later, more profound pieces like La Grande Illusion and Les Regles du Jeu, and help make those the more human by not being too sententious.

This film, shot in less than a month, contains some of the pleasures in Renoir's oeuvre. The fluid camerawork and the social satire have here, as elsewhere, rewards to yield, culminating in the 360 degree shot in the finale. Maybe the rashness accounts for flaws in the one-dimensional characters and the not so successful dramaturgy but the social messages about cooperatives, debt and exploitation are conveyed well.

The Jacques Prevert-Jean Renoir teaming provides for an exciting tale of murder, mens rea, judgment and justice. The narrative frame introduces the story through straightforward exposition. Great depth of field and uneven staging/blocking of characters constructs a space unobtrusively in order to make room for the free interchange of political positions of everyday people. It is difficult to deny that M. Lange isn't a call for French citizens to become politicized, but one cannot overlook the contribution of Prevert to that end. Mobile framing is employed once Florelle's character introduces the past events that led her and M. Lange into the provincial regions. The mobile framing operates to connect lives that might otherwise require the conjuring of contrived connections by the audience. The fact is that these people live and work together - that is the essence of their connection, and for Prevert (and Renoir) such a connection is enough to create a demand for respect, dignity and autonomy. Batala throws a wrench in all that good stuff and provides the catalyst for politicization. Is murder condoned in this film or is it representative of the sacrifice that will be made to take up a firm political position? (a massive issue at the time of the Popular Front) M. Lange is all about context but in the most self-reflexive manner. Even the Arizona Jim storyline has a direct conversation operating within the French film industry at the time. M. Lange isn't anachronistic but for a contemporary audience, the concept of group responsibility has distorted and perverted into an amorphous hideous blob cranking up the volume of the latest tech trinket to drown out the screams of a Kitty Genovese in the alley below. This makes M. Lange a refreshing take on politics but a depressing one, given the contemporary spectator has the foreknowledge that WWII happened and that international corporate conglomeration (Batala's wet dream) has become so dominant that an Occupy Movement on Wall Street looks more like a corporate-sponsored Hoedown-cum-Pow-Wow... and just wait for the time management game version to be released on iPhone in the next three months. If M. Lange were real life in 2013 we can be sure that Batala "getting his" would mean getting the highest amount of profit participation and controlling the creative accounting end of things when the box office closes on the film's run. It is beautiful to see a world fighting for what is right. Prevert was unabashed in that regard. Renoir was fighting for something else - both more personal and universal. In a true Renoir film, Batala would have been a more complex character... likely something between King Louis in La Marseillaise and Dede in La Chienee. That is to say, his return would be announced and his escape would be ensured at the expense of some poor bugger's own life... in a kind of reprehensible accident. What does the 360 shot mean to me? I believe that it represents a political statement about the deferral of responsibility. The Lange and Batala roles are a clever reversal of the real issue... where do you stand against the threat of fascism that will soon begin stomping faces (which it did in abundance).

It's not funny but its upbeat yet conflicted message of the hippie dream - 1930s style, plays with your emotions ultimately leaving you happier and more optimistic than before. It's not a simple story but it's put together so beautifully that it's easy to follow.

The picture this paints is of a mad muddled melange of dozens of colourful characters that somehow live as one giant happy utopian family. Once you've got used to the subtitles you're sucked into that world. Compared with American and English... and indeed most French films from this era what's remarkable about this is just how natural and realistic it is.

Besides 'Batala', the larger than life anti-hero, everyone else is just ordinary but not dull, they've all got real personalities, they're the sort of people we think we'd know if we were around then. M Lange himself, played by Rene Lefervre is convincing and endearing as the simple minded dreamer who writes the escapist Wild West comic stories. Stunningly beautiful Florelle is Lange's girlfriend who in this utopian world is not just subservient eye-candy, she's as much a part of society as any man. It's refreshing to see such an enlightened attitude in a 30s movie.

Everything about this fast-moving story seems so natural that you feel you're part of it. It's somewhere you can go to relax. M Renoir is brilliant at making his celluloid world where one man's fantasy awakens his neighbours' sense of community feel so real to us. By evoking a manufactured nostalgia and a desire for shared ideals he makes us, the audience feel like we're part of his story, which is our story. Like most good story tellers, Renoir leaves little gaps in the plot for us to insert our own characters into. This makes this very engaging.

It takes a while to locate one's bearings in this work, although that speaks to its emotional and thematic complexity. The film has the constant pace and vivacity and glee that is (stereotypically?) associated with Renoir - the film is something of a romantic whirl, with the interconnections of men and women are beguilingly dramatized in all their fleeting glory. Even the scenes with the wicked boss have an initial joie de vivre. Lange himself retains a restrained calm at the heart of it all - until he comes to illustrate the normal man who takes a desperate, self-sacrificing stand for the good of others. Although idealistic, his action resonates when offset against the explicitly cartoonish heroism of the Arizona Jim character (which we see embodied in some epically corny tableaux), and the impact thrives from being based in a muscular evocation of left-wing collectivist sympathies (a strand that comes over heavily in the almost idyllic scenes of things after the demise of the capitalist - with workers happy and lovers unfettered; although I found the very end of the film a bit puzzling).