Nana

Having discovered and enjoyed Jean Renoir's first film LA FILLE DE L'EAU/WHIRLPOOL OF FATE (1925), I was looking forward to his second feature, NANA (1926) as it was based on a classic work by Emile Zola. Being a silent film enthusiast, I wanted to like NANA very much but while parts of it have merit, the bulk of it is overlong and overblown. Most of the blame must go to Renoir for letting the success of his first film go to his head. From the natural simplicity and directness of L'EAU, he does a 180 and gives us an extravagant costume drama full of large scale sets and florid performances.

An inordinate amount of criticism has been leveled at Catherine Hessling's title character and while her performance is overripe, she is simply doing what the director told her to. She was not really an actress but a model who was also Renoir's wife at the time. She acquitted herself quite well as a naive waif in their first film together but here she resembles Susan Alexander in CITIZEN KANE who is trapped in something out of her depth. To be fair, the other performers also indulge in the stereotype of exaggerated silent film acting but just aren't on screen as much.

NANA was a French-German co-production which accounts for the presence of the two Weimar Cinema icons, Werner Krauss and Valeska Gert. It also helps to explain the acting style that permeates the film as a whole essentially ruining it for those who aren't familiar with it. In fact if Renoir's name hadn't been on it, I would have assumed that this was a German movie all the way. It could almost be viewed as a French parody of German Expressionism but that was not Renoir's intention. Still for the film student and/or lover of silent movies, there is much to enjoy.

As befits the story of a chorus girl who wants to be an actress and then becomes a "kept woman", the settings are quite lavish going from a Moulin Rouge style cabaret (complete with a Can-Can number) to a theater where Nana flops as a serious actress to a lavish grand hotel where she is situated by her aristocratic lover (Krauss). To match these settings there are numerous remarkable costumes which only get more elaborate as the film progresses. The massive sets were designed by future director Claude Autant-Lara who also appears in the role of Werner Krauss' wife's admirer.

In the end NANA proved to be a costly flop that ruined Catherine Hessling's chances as an actress and forced Renoir to sell some of his father's paintings to help recoup some of the costs. Years later in his autobiography he called it "a mad undertaking". Fortunately Renoir learned from it and went on to a have a celebrated career. The movie was first released on DVD in 2007 on a Lionsgate/Studio Canal as part of a 3 disc set. Now Kino Lorber has just released it on Blu-Ray with music by Antonio Coppola, a restoration comparison and audio commentary. Worth seeing for fans of Renoir and silent movies...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

The premise of Emile Zola's magnificent cycle of novels 'Les Rougon-Macquart' is that we are what we are through a combination of genetics and environment and that bad social conditions are apt to bring hereditary vices to the surface.

We are first introduced to Nana as a girl in book seven of the series 'L'Assommoir', in which her blood has been spoiled by a long heredity of misery and drunkenness and where she is already on the path to being a cocotte. She appears again as the title character of book nine and here the process is complete. Having failed miserably as an actress she decides to make her fortune by employing her talents in the boudoir. Her life as a courtesan can be viewed either as a symbol of Second Empire corruption or as a means by which she can gain revenge for her deprived childhood.

Jean Renoir's version represents his most challenging film of the silent era and he comes through with flying colours. The elements we have come to expect from this director are all here in terms of theatricality, tragi-comedy, relations between the upper and lower classes and of course excellent characterisations. Visually there is the painterly influence of his father Auguste. He has certainly got his money's worth here as future director Claude Autant-Lara is not only credited as set and costume designer but also plays the role of Fauchery whilst Pierre Lestringuez has adapted the novel as well as playing Bordenave. Memorable sequences are the Grand Prix races, Nana dancing the Can-Can in the Bal Mabille and not least the disturbing scene where Nana's maid and hairdresser witness her ridiculing and degrading her three high society lovers one by one.

Renoir has chosen to concentrate mainly on the trio of Nana and Counts Muffat and Vandeuvres. Muffat, whose obsession with Nana brings only disgrace and despair, is played by the brilliant Werner Krauss. He became one of Germany's most respected and honoured actors despite his closeness to Hitler's regime and his virulent anti-Semitism. His mesmerising performance epitomises aristocratic arrogance and disdain which makes his character's fall from grace even more pitiful. As Vandeuvres we have Jean Angelo, an actor of great presence and sensitivity whose character pays the ultimate price for his 'amour fou'. As Nana, Renoir has cast his then wife Catherine Hessling whom he met when she was modelling for his father. Her portrayal has been described as 'idiosyncratic'. Physically she is a far cry from Zola's imagining but she has captured Nana's innate vulgarity and there is no mistaking that her character has, in Zola's own words, "grown from the Parisian pavement."

Beautifully restored with some gorgeous tints, the film has retained a little of Maurice Jaubert's original score and an imaginative, newly composed score has been provided by Marc-Olivier Dupin for a fourteen piece ensemble.

Despite the film's success it could never recoup its massive budget and Renoir himself lost the money he had put in through the fault of the distributors. Not far short of a century later it remains the work of a master and as Renoir himself has said "It is the only one of my silent films that is worth talking about."

I really looked forward to seeing Nana after seeing Renoir amazing debut work, Whirlpool of Fate. I had read that Nana was generally considered his best silent film so I had high hopes. Sadly this felt like a huge step backwards.

Catherine Hessling is the main problem with this film. Her acting is over the top, even for a silent film. Her acting is more like what one would expect in a film from the early teens, not the late 20s. She usually has the same face, which reminds me (sorry to say) of someone with constipation pains. It was also very difficult to believe that any man would fall for this femme fatale. There was nothing charming about her at all.

The film was also quite long drawn, the camera work was uninteresting (aside from a shot of a horse race) and the editing was dull. The story reminded me of Pabst's Pandora's Box. It is interesting to compare the two because there are only 3 years between these films. Pandora's Box simply scores on every level where Nana fails.

This film is only for Renoir completists or very serious silent films buffs.

NANA is a dramatic love story by Renoir, one of the few directors that understood all aspects of cinematography. For me, these early mutes are the reason why cinematography is also an art form. Much more then the money driven "products" that came out the last years (spending millions on 1 film, but not including a story?). NANA only strengthened that opinion. It's certainly not the best film from the thirties I've seen. I find some scenes too long for that, but it's still very good. The sets are inside the hotel and house are amazing, the plot is strong. The actor that played Muffat is the best I've seen from that generation of films. I'm not really a fan of films that have a dramatic love story as a starting-point, I find it quickly too slow, but that's just really un-PC from me. ;) 6.5/10

"Nana" (1926) is the third film by the great Jean Renoir. I've been unable to find his first film, which he co-directed with another filmmaker, but having seen his second film and solo debut, "La fille de l'eau" (a.k.a. "Whirlpool of Fate"; 1925), I was a bit surprised by "Nana", for a few reasons.

First, there's the star of both films, Catherine Hessling. In "La fille de l'eau", she played an innocent young girl, and she did so about as well as could be expected, given how almost absurdly overdrawn her character was in terms of virtue and purity. In "Nana", suffice it to say, her role is a bit different. She plays a tart, a prostitute. Once again, her character is ridiculously exaggerated, caricatured to an absolutely laughable extent. Here, however, unlike in Renoir's last film, Hessling does nothing to help matters. Her acting in "Nana" is so over the top that it at times becomes a marked hindrance to the integrity of the film. I would expect this kind of performance in a Keystone comedy from 1914, maybe, but not from a Renoir film in the latter half of the '20s.

Furthermore, the narrative breaks down into tragic melodrama in the latter portion of the film, and any thematic substance from the first half of the film is ultimately diluted in the perceived necessities of plot and story. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected; it's common of so many silents from this era.

That, however, is about the extent of my criticism for the film. It's a good film, overall, or at least a solid one. In some ways it surpasses "La fille de l'eau", and in other ways it falls short of it. The narrative in "Nana" is stronger than its predecessor's: The characters are more complex and less archetypal, and the themes are more pronounced while they last. To venture further into the subjective, I'd say that "Nana" has higher entertainment value than Renoir's last film, and that it's more dramatically engaging.

On the other hand, there was an element of visual poetry in "La fille de l'eau" that is missing from "Nana". Perhaps it's the issue of color tinting, at least in part. I've always felt that color tinting degrades a film's artistic value. "La fille de l'eau" was not tinted, and it preserved a certain artistry in the film's aesthetic that the tinted images in "Nana" simply can not match. I will concede, though, that if Renoir is going to insist on color tinting, the tinting in "Nana" is handled well — a series of similarly toned warm tints, providing a more consistent visual mood than, for instance, the messy rainbow of colors from all parts of the visible spectrum in Fritz Lang's "The Spiders" films.

"La fille de l'eau" also featured impressive montage, and one wonders where the editing talents displayed in that film disappeared to for "Nana". That's not to say that "Nana" is poorly edited, but simply that it doesn't exhibit the noticeably skilled use of montage that we saw in the former film. Renoir is credited for the editing in "Nana", whereas I can't find a credit for the editing in "La fille de l'eau", so it's possible that it wasn't Renoir's editing talents that we saw in that film, although I'm still willing to guess that it was.

Finally, "La fille de l'eau" gets a nudge for a fantastic dream sequence that I'm sure anyone who saw the film will remember. But enough contrasting. There are certainly similarities as well. The most obvious place where the two films can be compared is in their social inclinations. Both films, and for that matter every Renoir film I've ever seen, feature a blending of characters from different social classes. "Boudu Saved From Drowning", "The Lower Depths", "Grand Illusion", "The Diary of a Chambermaid", "The Golden Coach" — Renoir loves to throw lower class characters and upper class characters into the same setting and see what comes of it. It's his way of exploring his humanist disposition. Other filmmakers have done it in their own way. Kurosawa liked to look to the lower classes alone to find the true nature of humanity. Visconti, though not exactly a humanist, liked to look largely to the upper classes to explore human nature. Renoir likes to look at both, together — the coexistence of the two in a particular setting — and he defines humanity through the shared qualities, as well as the conflicts, that arise under those conditions.

"Nana" is a very much a male film, in that, like Luis Buñuel, there is a focus on the power of the female, and the manner in which a woman can trigger a maelstrom of chaos in the lives of the men who fall at her feet, and who set aside everything — even that most precious social status and respectability — in order to attain the object of their passion. This theme has the potential to be feminist, of course, but not here. The film's sympathies are almost entirely with the despairing male characters, and the female tantalizer is depicted as an absolutely ridiculous human being (although she is ultimately afforded a small degree of humanity).

On a side note, there's a role in 'Nana" for Werner Krauss, the German actor who appeared in films like Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and Pabst's "The Joyless Street". He's good. In fact, excluding Catherine Hessling, the whole cast is pretty good.

The film is made by a fairly young and inexperienced Jean Renoir, and yet it is clearly the work of a professional. Renoir was not the master of the cinema that he would later become, but already he was a good filmmaker, and his talent for storytelling is evident even this early in his career.

RATING: 6.00 out of 10 stars