La fille de l'eau

This will mostly seem outdated now. A silent melodrama about a young destitute girl in the French countryside trapped between men who desire her, and on the other hand by her efforts to comply or reciprocate. Various bargains that have to do with money as the more or less thinly veiled metaphor for sex.

But there is a dream sequence here that, as so often with these silent dreams, I urge you to see. It's about the girl transmuting in her feverish mind these barely comprehensible forces that threaten the virgin soul into images that will make sense; so an imaginative flight, a sensual, delirius game of hide-and-seek where the coarse, violent men haunt her down, where a piece of rope transforms into the snake of mischievous desire, a point-of-view rushing towards a door and the light outside, and finally the man who can protect her shown, quite literally, as a champion on his white horse galloping across the skies.

The overwhelming experience is so perfectly about the distorted imprint of the world. This should be seen next to the best moments in Epstein. There is shadow here cast by the eye in motion, emotional or otherwise.

Another note that intrigues, a blemish in the perfect picture of her well-to-do benefactor. His parents are shown at one point hastily leaving for Algiers on account of business; what was probably meant innocently at the time, now can only leave us wondering at his source of wealth.

Admittedly made merely to exploit his wife Catherine Hessling's "photogenic" attributes, Jean Renoir's solo directorial debut already displays his trademark humanism and painterly eye – while Hessling herself turns in a far more naturalistic performance here than she did in NANA (1926).

The plot is simple and melodramatic: Hessling loses her father, is abused by her brutish uncle (possibly inspired by Griffith's BROKEN BLOSSOMS [1919]), falls in with crooked gypsies (who ultimately incur the wrath of the people and have their caravan burned to the ground), is taken in by a wealthy family but is caught stealing for her uncle's sake…until the latter gets his come-uppance and the girl is engaged to her employer's young son. The accompanying organ score is effectively evocative to begin with but, eventually, it takes a tediously avant-gardist turn.

The film's barge opening anticipates Jean Vigo's L'ATALANTE (1934) and the search at sea, F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE (1927); there is also some remarkably fast cutting throughout, a style which Renoir would largely forsake in his subsequent work. The highlight of WHIRPLOOL OF FATE, however, is undoubtedly an amazing dream sequence which, uncharacteristically for the director, is heavily reliant on optical effects and camera technique; incidentally, the two shorts I followed it with on Lionsgate 3-Disc "Jean Renoir's Collector's Edition" proved similarly experimental.

A complex and sympathetic narrative about a young woman that begins with her working on a river barge with her father and her uncle and follows her through difficult circumstances after her father dies, exploited but resourceful, even using petty crime, particularly in the company of a scampish boy. There's something Pickfordesque about Catherine Hessling (who became Mme. Renoir), and a touch of D. W. Griffith in her occasional hanky-winding, but Renoir is not as sentimental. There's a dream sequence as good as Hitchcock decades later, night scenes (a haystack on fire), and observations about the ways of the well-born that are a start on the way to La Règle du jeu.

This is the first film Renoir directed alone and it is by far his best silent film, of the ones I have seen (Whirlpool of Fate, Nana, Charleston Parade and The Little Match Girl).

The editing was just amazing. The quick cuts where so spot on and well paced. And the trick shots where like something from a poetic avant garde film. There was also a very nice close up of eyes, which reminded me of the Spaghetti Westerns.

The story is not bad. Reminded me a little of D.W. Griffith mellow drama. The acting is also not too bad but the strength of this film is first and foremost its visual aspect, something sadly lacking in his other silent films I have seen.

The ambiguity of politics in La Fille de L'Eau replaces the ambiguity of stylistics from Une Vie Sans Joie (1924). I find it hard to determine which early idea presented by the film should then be applied throughout the film... that hope springs from the unsung courage and perseverance of everyday people or that wisdom is seated in the lives of those who know to avoid being in the way of their husband's racing car? Is Renoir flippant in his observation of the casualness of fate and abnormality of instinct? This film leaves me with more questions than answers as it is a launching point for social themes that will be teased out throughout Renoir's career. I would like to think that Renoir cares about "the little people" but it is well recognized that he is ambiguous and ambivalent in his political expressions. This film is a good example. The documented views of Vigo's social cinema have a solid application in the barge scenes and the milieu of the film more generally, however, the stylistic system dominates the cinematic experience(like all Renoir films really). Psych-driven flashback shots and angular close-ups eventually give way to rapid editing montage sequences. The caravan scene is first expressed in Eisensteinian juxtapositional collision montage and is then remembered by Gulune in Gance-like hyper-psychological rapid montage. As Gulune undergoes further stress from her environment and circumstance, she hallucinates...and nightmaresque sequences are constructed from every French Impressionist technique in the book: superimpositions, mattes, over-exposures, surreal visuals (mise-en-scene), reverse-projection, slow-motion, oblique blocking within the frame, unnatural settings, and even mirror distortions a la Dr Tube (Gance). Gulune was close to death and I conjecture that this is the over-arching theme of the film as opposed to the tired fixations on Renoir's supposed ever-present and all-pervasive socialist politics (even if subverted and often excused under the banner of "naturalism"). Perhaps my thesis would hold more weight if La Fille de L'Eau had been produced in 1926 or 1927 as sound film was to bully silent film to death... but then again Renoir was always considered forward-thinking and generally ahead of his time.