A Film Canon

 

 

Boudu has a much stronger social agenda than The Bitch, albeit one that is almost entirely subsumed into stylistics. After rescuing Boudu (Michel Simon), a tramp, from suicide, a bourgeois gentleman takes him under his wing, to the consternation of wife and mistress. Although the ensuing situation reveals his inconsistencies and hypocrisies, it also reduces Boudu to a pet monkey; cinema's first crazy houseguest. Nevertheless, Renoir's cinematography prioritises the middle distance in such a way as to offer a distinctly visual injunction against bourgeois insularity and myopia. This is particularly evident in the montage of outdoor scenes that opens the first act, but also explains the proliferation of windows in all the interior sequences, which reduce the various narrative events to so many frames. Even when these windows aren't visible, their presence can be felt, whether as a result of natural light, outdoor sounds, or a characterisation of the camera screen itself as such a window, clearest at the moment of Boudu's rescue, when the anxious street crowd's observation of his resuscitation is implicitly identified with our own. In this light, the ambiguous status of the bourgeois family's 'hospitality' - and, in particular, the fine line between paternalism and voyeurism - comes down to the relationship between their drawing room window and the telescope that occupies it, from which they first spy Boudu.