Le carrosse d'or

... or La Carrozza d'Oro, or Le Carrosse d'Or. Take your pick: the film has an early flavour of the "Euro-pudding", with a mixed (and sometimes mixed-up) Anglo-Italian cast. It was shot principally in English, which meant an extra layer of strain for La Magnani, whose manic, over-the-top performance can't quite hide the somewhat anaemic storyline.

Luckily, her overacting fits well enough with the character's context and the decidedly light and bawdy mood of the whole piece: she's a professional Commedia del Arte 'actor' touring a 16th Century Latin America which decadent Spaniards hold in their venal grip. The great Italian star drags behind her a motley crew of fellow-Italians who match her quiver for quiver in the wild hand-gesturing repertoire and performs convincingly the stage stunts that were the Commedia's stock in trade. Magnani's antics also serve as a welcome distraction from leading man Paul Campbell's comatose acting. This American non-entity gives "wooden" a bad name. Whilst La Magnani keeps running through her vast back-catalogue of facial expressions, he only ever seems able to muster two, at best. Was Renoir asleep when this guy auditioned?

Anyway, none of that matters, because this is a film that is as much art-directed as it is directed. Huge respect is owed to designers Mario Chiari and Gianni Poldori for sets that manage to be both lavishly theatrical and convincingly lived in. Maria de Matteïs and Ginevra Pasolini match their male colleagues' panache and inventiveness with a dazzling range of costumes that combine with the lush colour palette of the sets to deliver an exquisitely sensuous fantasia of this distant time and place. Rarely was the glorious three-strip Technicolor process used with such erotic abandon and sheer vitality.

Thank God for this too, because it's not as if the lame script, with its flat-footed storyline and schematic comedy was anything to write home about. There is no doubting Renoir's genuine desire to pay tribute to the Commedia genre, and his loving attention to the detail of early theatrical craft draws you in. After all, wasn't this popular form of street theatre an early precursor to the great art perfected later on the big screen by the likes of Lubitsch or Renoir himself?

In the end, I feel an indulgent love for this film, a late entry into the great French master's career and -like French Cancan - a little bit 'so what?'. Not only could I get drowned again and again in its sensuous celebration of Technicolor as life and drama, but there is also a core quality that has to do with how Renoir renders the spiritual essence of the Commedia company: throughout the film, these displaced paupers and underfed globe-trotters display total servitude and total freedom in equal measure. These are the two opposites of their fraught but impassioned lives and the source of the manic energy they need for the performance that will buy them the day's only meal. As a filmmaker who frequently struggled to achieve his vision against the strictures of the commercial film industry, Renoir seems to know intimately what those characters' lives were about.

I saw this recently at a retrospective celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Cahiers du Cinema, and I approached it with some trepidation. I didn't know if I would like it as much as Renoir's more famous films of the 30s, and I had previously found some of the color films he did in the 50s to be less accessible. I needn't have worried; this film is a masterpiece. The color is sumptuous and breathtaking; I have always like Technicolor, in which this film is shot, for the richness of its palette. The acting is brilliant and introduced me to some wonderful actors I have never heard of before. Well worth viewing.

This tale of an Italian commedia dell'arte troupe just landed in eighteenth-century Peru is an enjoyable time spent with Renoir and his company of players. It is similar in many ways to Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) from 1939: the members of a large cast fall in and out of love with one another, with the inevitable jealousies, disappointments, and ecstasies. Renoir's sensibility also remains steadfastly eighteenth-century, as expressed in the quotation of a vaudeville song from the Marriage of Figaro in the titles before The Rules of the Game: 'Sensitive hearts, faithful hearts, who blame fickle Cupid, stop your cruel complaints. Is it a crime to change lovers? If Cupid has wings, is it not to flit about?' Renoir's feel for music is as clear in the Golden Coach as it was in Rules. Excerpts from Vivaldi form the soundtrack, and as familiar as they may sound to us in the twenty-first century, it was surely a more daring choice in 1952, when these pieces were only entering the mainstream. And how many films have a sight-gag with a serpent (the instrument, not the snake)?

Unfortunately, comparing the two films also shows that in revisiting these themes Renoir is not as inspired the second time around. Perhaps the difference is Renoir anxiously watching his world on the precipice in 1939 and gratefully seeing that something survived in 1952. The film is beautifully shot in Technicolor by Claude Renoir (Jean's nephew, who also shot Barbarella and The Spy Who Loved Me!) and the actors are uniformly good, especially Anna Magnani. If the Golden Coach isn't a masterpiece, it's still 109 minutes of pleasure for the eye, the ear, and the spirit from a master of his craft.

This film is really a masterpiece. This was also French director François Truffaut's opinion, and he named his film company "Les Films du Carrosse" as a tribute to it. I once read a review in which the critic expressed the opinion that Anna Magnani's looks couldn't make it likely that the male characters of the plot fell in love with her. But this is a complete misunderstanding of the story, it is not because of her beauty they love her, but because she makes them laugh, she brings them to that other world which theater creates. For aren't we all made of the same stuff dreams are made of, as the great Will once wrote?... If you haven't seen this film, don't wait if you get a chance to watch it. In France, where I live, it's not available in DVD yet, but since it recently came out in the US, and in Japan, I am looking forward to soon finding it here.

It is the film of Anna Magnani. and that is far to be a surprise. because it represents not only charming reconstruction of Commedia dell' Arte but the chance to admire a precise way to build the seduction of a woman discovering herself. it is a Jean Renoir film and his mark is obvious in each scene. it is the film of a great show and bitter commedy. but , if you see it with more profound interest, you have the chance to discover a profound exploration of art, society and significant things. and that transforms it in one of usefull films escaping from the circle of specific genre. because, in essence it is a wise parable about the clash between life and art.