La Chienne (1931)

 Jean Renoir’s “La Chienne”

Thematic Elements: 

Jean Renoir’s La Chienne is an ironic drama and diabolical satire that focuses on bourgeois hypocrisy and plays on the illusion of expectation and reality. The characters, relationships, and events in La Chienne are nothing what they seem. None of the characters are what they seem nor are any of the relationships are what they seem. La Chienne opens with an introductory scene in which puppets tell us we are about to watch a film which is neither comedy nor drama, contains no moral message, has nothing to prove, and the characters are neither heroes nor villains. Because we are given no ground to stand on, we must make our own assumptions about the people and situations in the film. But these assumptions are what get us into trouble. Nothing is actually ever what it seems, none of the characters are what they seem, and none of the relationships are what they seem. The puppets in the beginning of the film even say of the characters, “He's a good sort, shy, getting on in years, and incredibly naive. In sensitivity and intellect, he's so superior to those around him that they take him

for a complete idiot. She is a girl with a certain charm and a touch of vulgarity. She's always sincere and lies all the time.” The complete contradiction in all these descriptors shows that the characters are not one thing, but a complex thing that takes more than just assumption but understanding. To really understand the paradox of the characters is to understand that the characters are both individuals and products of the society they live in simultaneously. The film shows us through its progression that everything in this society is a commodity. Maurice is an artist, but to make a living he must work for a wholesale company and must parasitically leach off of his wife who receives lots of money from the military to compensate for the death of her former military husband. Lulu is a woman who wants to spend the rest of her life with a man called Dede but because of her lack of wealth, she must prostitute herself to make ends meet. Dede is a character who also feels affectionately for Lulu but more importantly wants economic safety and security so he must pimp out Lulu so that the two of them can afford to live. This is where the paradox lies. The characters all have their own unique individualism and personalities with their own values and goals. However, the characters are forced to throw their individualism by the wayside in order to pursue financial security. This draws the illusion of expectation and reality, the expectation being that they will behave in their own individualism yet the reality is that they cannot because they must make themselves a commodity to the people around them in order to gain financial means. The film is presenting us a society in which the characters cannot be their individualist selves, but rather must be a prostitute. The best illustration of this theme in the film is Maurice’s art. Maurice is an artist who makes beautiful paintings. However, no one in the film actually cares about these paintings as any sort of art. His wife just wants them out of the house so she can have space to fill her house with more material possessions. Lulu just wants Maurice’s art simply to have Dede sell them so they can make a profit. The art dealers who buy the art do not even care about the art, they only buy the art because they believe Lulu to be the artist and Lulu must prostitute herself to them in order for them to buy her art. They then sell the art for thousands of dollars even though the artist who painted them in not a well-known artist but in fact Maurice who is not an American female painting as Dede and Lulu convince them. Everyone views the art as a commodity and a means to make more money. Renoir is suggesting that our economic system that our society abides by simply makes people and their art into commodities. 

Camerawork: 

Renoir uses naturalism to great affect by using natural sounds and locations to present scenes in real space. Camera movements place characters in specific locations in a specific world. The camera often holds on specific settings and scenes of Parisian life either before or after turning to view the life of the characters. Renoir also uses doors and windows as a vista to a larger scene happening outside of the scene in which the characters are inhabiting. This allows the narrative to proceed in time and space that the characters inhabit, showing them as an extension of a larger world. This illustrates that the characters are simply an extension of the society that they live in, once again taking away their individualism to replacing that with a bigger societal significance. Renoir also uses light, darkness, and shadow to draw hints of German expression in this film. The expressionism Renoir uses in his brushstrokes evoke a dark cynicism while the naturalism he uses places that darkness right here in the tangible real world. This once again plays back to the original point of the theme of the paradoxical nature of these characters and their society.

Best Shot: 

The best shot in the film is the shots that happen after Maurice kills Lulu. The camera is focused on the street below in which a man is singing to a crowd of people for money, the camera then pans up the building on the street to the different levels and arrives on a cat and a window. Through the window is the horrific scene of Lulu lying bloody on the bed with Maurice laying over her. The camera movement from the street to the window plays off Renoir’s themes that the actions of the characters in the film are merely the reactions they exhibit when they realize that they are merely commodities in a society. When Lulu tells Maurice that she does not love him, but is only with him to sell his paintings, he becomes horrified to realize that his art is simply a commodity to her and that she is simply a commodity to himself, just like the street singer is simply a commodity to the crowd in the street. After killing her, Renoir shows us with this shot that this horror is simply the result of the world created outside of our windows.