Arroseur et arrosé

I had read descriptions of this movie at least 20 years before I first saw it; inevitably, the movie is a disappointment. Actually, this is the Lumiere Brothers' second version of this simple idea: filmed in a much more elaborate garden than their earlier version. Its title is usually given in English as 'Watering the Gardener', but a more accurate translation of the French original would be 'Hoser and Hosed'.

SPOILERS COMING. A gardener is using a hosepipe to water the garden. A boy sneaks up behind him and treads on the hose, shutting off the flow. The gardener, of course, peers directly into the empty nozzle to see what's wrong. Cue the boy to lift his foot, restoring the flow and soaking the gardener. Spotting the fleeing boy, the gardener catches him and spanks him.

When I first read about this movie, I'd visualised the boy as being about seven or eight years old at most. In the earlier (1895) version, he's clearly at least twelve: really too old to be engaged in this sort of mischief ... and spanking a boy of that age is not so much punitive as something else altogether. In this 1896 remake, he seems to be about thirteen or fourteen ... which makes the action seem even more contrived.

Worse luck; in this version, the teenaged boy is clearly capable of outrunning the middle-aged gardener ... so, when the prankster is first rumbled, the boy has to slip and fall in order to enable the gardener to catch him. Fair enough, except that the boy's tumble is obviously staged ... straining credibility even farther.

The Lumiere brothers' very earliest movies were simply filmed events: documentary footage. The 1895 version of 'Hoser and Hosed' is historically significant as an early attempt to tell a story in the cinema medium rather than merely record events. This '96 remake is filmed in a much more elaborate (and more beautiful) garden, but fails to improve on the crude original. I'll rate this remake only 6 out of 10.

Although the other reviewer offers this as a simple remake of the smash hit of the original Lumiere catalogue, "L'arroseur arrosé", this is actually more of a sequel, as the gardener grabs his tormentor in this one and offers him a fine kick in the pants and a bit of a squirt in return. It's just as casual and primitive in its construction as the original -- although keeping the action within the field of view was a rather involved and arcane discipline. You don't want the action taking place where the audience can't see it -- unless the point is the reaction of the people you can see.

The first remake of the original would wait until the following year, when Alice Guy did it. Other producers simply took a print of the film and copied it in the lab.