Toni
Jean Renoir
France, 1934, 1:25
With: Charles Blavette, Jenny Helia. .
Out with the film studio turned at the time, Toni figure precursor film made of neo-realism. Financed by Marcel Pagnol Martigues filmed without background music, using as secondary characters and locals, the scenario is also based on a true story, which reinforces its documentary aspect.
Monument Renoir's career, Toni is not yet his most famous film. Back on a masterpiece.
When he realizes Toni in 1934, Jean Renoir dixit itself undergoes a phase of extreme realism. One of those recurring periods in his biography where only subtle seams real important to him. After several business failures in which he suffered multiple setbacks with producers and distributors, Renoir, just to recharge, invests the south of France and plateaus of his friend Marcel Pagnol who just finished Angela. Renoir picnic to the creator of Marius part of its technical team, some of his players and chose to film a truly sordid news story: the story of a murder committed by a woman unhappily married to a foreman Verreux. But what is primarily interested in Renoir's Toni, is painting a mixed environment that Martigues, Provence where immigrants from southern Europe came to try their luck. The film exudes a familiarity with the place and its inhabitants, without the need to chat beyond measure of 'real life that feeds the shooting. "
Toni rital Aboriginal wife Mary, but it likes to tear the heart Josepha the Spaniard. Renoir browses the way and not really addressing the structural melodramatic script only half the film before, temporal ellipses of rare for modern times have wound up with merciless rigor romance doomed by social determinism . For Renoir, that season, the key is elsewhere.
He needs eg film men on the way to work, listen with your eyes the wind caress the scrubland, everything is going to pan, just to set the show in the changing nature ... This scrupulous attention to minute variations of the real and obvious love for the working class was born the legend Toni justified, "film precursor of Neorealism." In fact apart Grémillon we hardly find any trace in the cinema franchouillard prewar such a manic desire to record for best transcend the spectacle of objective reality.
But if Toni remains an absolutely remarkable film, is also compared to Renoir. Echoing the reasons already at work in previous films jealousy and murder recall fishwife The Bitch, love the banter and some secondary characters refer to Boudu, Renoir concocted in mixtures of formal Toni who will feed his great films to come: movement of the train that the circular structure of fiction will be included in The Human Beast, the camera moves after the players in the maze of nature Announce Party campaign and work on ladders plan anticipates the finale of The Great Illusion ...
historically Film fundamental and very revealing of the practice of the filmmaker in the 30's, Toni, like all Renoir recalled silly string lacks the clothes yet never intimidating the great work. Here, everything is as simple as a handshake fraternal and transparent as the light-drenched Provençal sun. Nothing but trivial magnified by the staging. More than ever, Renoir endorsed the award of Flaubert on literary practice: "Being present everywhere but visible nowhere." Like the great Gustavus, arabesques of John the boss means inimitable art of love of reality.
O. de Bruyn
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the footsteps of TONI
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