Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (1970)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

La cireuse électrique: Emilie's pride and joy is her parquet floor, which she waxes incessantly.  When her husband announces he has had a promotion, she begs him to buy her an electric waxer so that her floor will look even smarter.  The ensuing row is overheard by their nextdoor neighbour, who happens to a salesman.  Emilie gets her precious waxer, but her husband slips on the polished floor, bangs his head and dies.  After the funeral, Emilie marries a childhood sweetheart, but he is so sensitive to noise that he forbids his wife from using the waxer when he is at home.  When Emilie defies her husband a tragic outcome is inevitable...

La chanteuse: Jeanne Moreau sings 'Quand l'amour meurt' in a setting that evokes the Belle Époque.

Le roi d'Yvetot: Monsieur Duvallier leads a carefree life in Provence, happily playing bowls with his friends whilst his unfulfilled young wife has an affair with the local vet.  When he discovers his wife's infidelity, Duvallier asks several men how they would react in this situation.  In the end, he decides to live and let live.  Better to live in peace than provoke a crisis...

Eight years after completing his last film for the cinema, Le Caporal épinglé (1962), the great French cineaste Jean Renoir bowed out in style with this quirky anthology film for French and Italian television.  Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir is a characteristically good humoured affair which allows its director to exercise his concerns for modern life whilst offering up some pearls of wisdom to the latest generation of moviegoers.  Renoir, looking as jovial as ever, introduces the four segments that make up the film, which include three self-contained stories (each with a moral) and a musical interlude in which Jeanne Moreau sings a turn-of-the-century ballad on the transience of love.  Despite its author's self-effacing modesty, this final film is a pure delight - wise and funny and positively steeped in Renoir's undying love for humanity.

In the opening segment, Renoir pays tribute to his personal hero Hans Christian Andersen with a story that has a resonance with his early short film La Petite marchande d'allumettes (1928).  A subtle but carefully honed attack on materialism, Le Dernier réveillon contrasts the fabricated happiness of a penniless tramp with the equally illusory contentment of the idle rich.  Trapped in their cosy cocoon of privilege, the latter have lost sight of what life is meant to be about and seek amusement through the suffering of others who dwell in 'the real world'.  A tramp is paid to look pathetically through a window and watch their revels, but this proximity to real suffering proves too much to bear and the tramp's audience soon walks away in disgust.  Envious of the better off, the tramp and his companion create a fantasy for themselves to make life bearable.  They are so wrapped up in their dreams that they neglect their physical well-being and soon die from cold and starvation.  Both rich and poor fail to realise the futility of their delusions.

Renoir follows this bittersweet tale with another tragedy, but one presented in a very different style, that of comic opera.  A Greek chorus introduces a truculent satire on the age of consumerism, a man versus machine black comedy in which a floor waxer comes to symbolise all that is wrong with modern life.  For a proud housewife, such a gadget is the acme of her desires, but her obsessive love for this marvellous invention leads only to domestic discord, marital breakdown and violent death.  Again, Renoir scorns materialism and seems to regard this as the greatest threat to human happiness in the 20th century.

After an enchanting musical interlude which mourns the passing of love, Renoir takes us to sunny Provence for his final story, the one that is most redolent of his earlier work.  Described as a tribute to tolerance, the rarest of virtues in our modern age, Le Roi d'Yvetot is a gentle fable in which a cuckolded husband learns to live with his wife's infidelity so that he may continue his peaceful existence.  In an increasingly intolerant world, this tale appears particularly pertinent and contains the wisest piece of advice Renoir could have left us with.  Why create a fuss over nothing?  Forgive and forget - that's the secret of a contented life.

In retrospect, Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir would seem to be the most perfect conclusion to the director's remarkable career - a collection of masterfully crafted vignettes, each of which has a cogent moral for our time.  When he made it, Renoir did not anticipate this would be his final film.  He was planning to make another shortly afterwards with Jeanne Moreau entitled Juliette et son amour.  Alas, declining health put paid to his further cinematic ambitions and Renoir channelled his creative energies into his writing, publishing several novels and his acclaimed autobiography Ma vie et mes films.  After its first airing on television in 1970,  Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir gained a wider audience when it was given a theatrical release in 1975, just after the director had celebrated his 80th birthday.

Film Synopsis

Le dernier réveillon: one Christmas Eve, a tramp is paid to mournfully watch a party of revellers enjoying themselves at an expensive restaurant.  The tramp does his job too well and the head waiter sends him away, with a hamper filled with extravagant leftovers.  The tramp joins his companion and they reminisce on the fictional past they have created for themselves.  Their frozen corpses are later discovered by another pair of tramps, who help themselves to their repast.