Jean Renoir par Pascal Mérigeau (review)

This is surely the last word in Renoir biography, a prodigiously detailed account of a long and productive life, replete with personal and professional detail. Pascal Mérigeau offers comparatively little close filmic analysis and evaluation, but that does not form part of his brief. This is an ‘old-school’ biography of ‘Renoir the man’, and is emphatically none the worse for that. As such it will be of interest to students not only of cinema, but of virtually all aspects of twentieth-century French political and cultural life. As befits a classic biography, it sets out to give an account of its subject in the round — an apposite turn of phrase for the well-padded director — and left this reviewer at least with a powerful sense that his most memorable acting role, as Octave in La Règle du jeu, is even more of a self-portrait than might have been supposed. Renoir’s defining characteristic appears as an almost chronic indecisiveness and fear of commitment, even in the ‘Popular Front’ period. Thus Pierre Braunberger described him as ‘social sans être socialiste’ (p. 257), and even his support for Henri Langlois in 1968 was tainted with hesitation, causing Mérigeau to opine: ‘ce qui l’épouvante, c’est prendre parti’ (p. 891). Yet what might on a personal level have been stigmatized as spinelessness can be seen in another light as the key to his greatness, motivating him as an auteur (‘la seule cause qui lui importait [était] la sienne propre’, p. 492) and doubtless underlying the extraordinary openness that is his directorial trademark. It also, in all probability, accounts for the rapidity with which he adapted to life in California after emigration, ceasing to be a ‘French’ filmmaker virtually overnight. Mérigeau’s approach is anything but monotonously hagiographic, attributing due importance to figures such as Catherine (‘Dédée’) Hessling, Renoir’s father’s model and later, for some time, Jean’s wife, who first inspired him to pick up a camera, and Jacques Becker, his right-hand man par excellence before he embarked on a directorial career of his own. The apparatus criticus is suitably extensive, and mercifully Flammarion has not fallen victim to the maddening indexophobia sometimes characteristic of French publishers; a browse through its thorough listing demonstrates the immense range of Renoir’s connections and impact. This is an indispensable source for anybody interested in Renoir, and a necessary complement to more specifically cinematic approaches to his work.