Nana

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."

After the al fresco hallucinations of the La Fille de l'eau come the severities of Zola's interiors, the other side of the coin of Jean Renoir's theater. The opening shot reverses Hitchcock's in The Pleasure Garden, the eponymous coquette (Catherine Hessling) ascends a staircase and is lowered by a rope before the eager audience, her feet don't quite touch the ground. The femme fatale as marionette-mermaid, on stage she cannot play noblewomen so instead she collects noblemen, on goes the trajectory from "La Blonde Venus" to la petite duchesse to doomed courtesan. Many an admirateur éperdu comes and goes, helplessly smitten and withered. The ponderous Count Muffat (Werner Krauss) stands backstage next to medieval armors, later in her boudoir in... more

"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

Another film to cross off my Jean Renoir Complete List, another probably never to watch again. It's not that it's bad, generally it's pretty good and nearly always interesting but it's over-melodramatised and simplified Zola for my taste.

Actress Nana has men especially rich men eating out of the palm of her hand and begging for more, she has at least 3 suitors vying for her courtesan favours. How it all unravels is the subject of the classic tale. And the sets are marvellous, sub-Stroheim, the modern tinting and music very good (Studio Canal), the print clear and sharp, and the photography excellent considering the then technical limitations Renoir had to contend with. The big problem is Hessling's – and the other leads – constant over-acting spoil the flow of the story. Definitely not tres chic! They all make the contemporary British barnstorming actor Todd Slaughter look subtle in comparison, although to be fair for a lot of the time the leading men seemed to understudy statues to Nana's wildly waving arms. As a rule silent films needed expressive acting to hold wandering eyes in the cinemas, but this reminded me of the mickey-taking in Singin' In The Rain. A red blooded male swooningly said at the beginning in response to her stage dancing that she was "the pinnacle of elegance"! And I also doubt whether either sexists or feminists will find anything worthwhile.

But I enjoyed the 129 minutes as I like silent films anyway – if you're only a Renoir completist I think it'll be an ordeal for you to complete. Nice print and tints!

There is a specular quality to Nana that would appear to have some bearing on later Renoir films (Regle and M. Lange come to mind)... however, the affectations of the performances are so tremendously overwrought that each character becomes caricature. The plot plays out like a Punch and Judy show (in this reviewer's opinion) and I will be the first to admit that I would surely benefit from being more familiar with its literary roots in Zola (Nana that is to say... and not Punch and Judy!). The affectations also render the very milieu a grotesque, disdainful stage. Perhaps this was Renoir's intention. Perhaps Renoir was fighting against his better judgment to adapt literary sources prior to knowing the path of his own stylistic system and development. Nana has ample opportunities to employ Renoir's signature stylistic model, however, he refuses to liberate the camera or utilize deep staging for his multiple protagonists. Instead, we are left with theater-like tableau shots. The tableau and caricature make one wonder about how apt the blanketing of "naturalism" works as an operational descriptor across Renoir's oeuvre. But the coup de grace comes with the use of studio sets for exteriors during some of the scenes at the horse races. Much is left to desire and Renoir overemphasizes his ability to over-determine every aspect of the production. Again there is a near-death hallucination impressionist sequence at the end (like La Fille de L'Eau)... is Renoir prognosticating about the death of something in the cinematic medium itself? His next film would be an ironic compliment to the Jazz Singer.