Boats on the Marne: Jean Renoir’s Critique of Modernity by Prakash Younger (review)

Virtually all academics will at one time or another have come across what is known as the ‘write all you know’ answer, in which the student parades their perhaps considerable knowledge with scant regard for its relevance to the topic supposedly under discussion. Prakash Younger gives us something similar at substantially greater length in his ambitiously entitled monograph. His philosophical scholarship is not in doubt; Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Simone Weil are all present and correct along with the Bakhtinian chronotope, which constitutes the matrix of his argument. When it comes to his qualities as a film scholar, alas, serious doubts begin to set in. His gushing eulogy of La Règle du jeu (‘like a message in a bottle that dropped into my lap from a starry night sky’, p. xiii) gets the book off to an ominous start, and the text is marred throughout by on the one hand Younger’s insistence on dragging in multifarious intertexts, which are sometimes of questionable pertinence, on the other the frequent nebulousness of his formulations (‘a diegesis perfectly appropriate to a subject that we sense rather than directly see or hear’, p. 55). The text reads throughout as if Renoir’s films were of interest primarily as illustrations of sundry, and too often bloated, philosophical theses rather than in their own right, and panning for nuggets of perceptiveness (‘the dialogical narrative structure of a Renoir film is designed around trapdoors’, p. 85) was for this reviewer at least a turgid process. The real giveaway, however, is to be found in the bibliography, which is scandalously outdated and undernourished. Younger’s secondary reading appears to have been almost entirely in English and to have come to a halt (with a handful of exceptions) a very long time ago, so that there is no mention of Pascal Mérigeau’s definitive biography (Jean Renoir (Paris: Flammarion, 2012)), or of works such as Martin O’Shaughnessy’s Jean Renoir (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) or my own La Règle du jeu (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). The book is well produced and very decently illustrated, but that can only be by way of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. I hesitate even to recommend this for institutional libraries; it is frankly surprising that a reputable university press agreed to publish it.