La chienne (1931) is Jean Renoir's second sound film, and undoubtedly one of his greatest. The movie is neither a comedy nor a tragedy, we are told a bit disingenuously in the film's puppet-show Prologue, but just “the eternal story of the man, the woman, and the other man.” The man in question is the ironically named Maurice Legrand; he is played by the great Michel Simon, who also starred as a crusty old geezer in Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and in Jean Vigo's L’atalante (1934). At the start of La chienne, Legrand is a slave to dismal routine, convinced that life has passed him by. At work, he is a timid and punctilious accountant; at home, he is continually being humiliated by his insufferable, domineering wife Adèle (Magdeleine Bérubet). Legrand's only escape from his stifling petit bourgeois life comes on Sundays, when he paints for his own amusement, unaware that his artistic efforts might have value in the eyes of connoisseurs. But his life changes when he meets the woman in the story—the femme fatale, Lulu (Janie Marèze). Legrande falls in love with Lulu, and imagines starting life afresh with her; he remains naively unaware of her relation to the other man—her lover and pimp Dédé (Georges Flamand). Lulu, with Dédé's help, takes Legrand for everything he has, inveigles him into robbing his employer, and even makes money by selling his paintings, which she pretends to have painted herself. This is all a set-up for disaster, of course—but that's not quite what actually happens.
La chienne is something of an experimental film for its time, both in its violation of genre expectations, and in its stylistics. It prefigures Renoir's later films by using direct sound, real locations, long shots with much background detail, and extended tracking shots with relatively deep focus—none of which were common in 1931.The film also exhibits Renoir's lifelong fascination with the tension between real life and theater. On the one hand, La chienne is very much a realist film, in the sense that André Bazin later attributed to Renoir. There's always a feeling of life and movement extending beyond the frame; the long shots and long takes—often of actual Parisian boulevards, complete with ambient street noise—continually give us a sense of the larger social environment in which the characters live. On the other hand, the film continually calls attention to its own theatricality: both with its puppet-show prologue, and with the way that it presents turning points in the plot as set pieces, whose cinematography and editing are ostentatiously different from how they work elsewhere in the film.
Consider the key moments of Legrand's evolution, as he discovers that Lulu has been betraying him with Dédé all along. When Legrand sees Lulu and Dédé in bed together, the scene is shot, first through the window from outside, and then from the other side of the apartment, through two framing doorways. Then, the next morning, when Legrand confronts Lulu with his knowledge of her betrayal, and she just laughs at him, the scene is conveyed to us in a shot-reverse shot pattern, which is otherwise almost never used in the film (Renoir generally prefers to show conversation in two-shots, with very little cutting). And finally, when Legrand kills Lulu, and sets up Dédé to take the fall, we get an elaborate parallel montage between street musicians performing outside Lulu's building, and long shots of the actual murder (the camera first focuses on a cat on the balcony, then tracks in through the window to Lulu's apartment). All of these scenes deliberately call attention to their own artifice, in contrast to the free-flowing realism of the rest of the movie.
Essentially, La chienne is an anti-bourgeois (or anti-petit-bourgeois) fable. Legrand starts out as a prisoner of both business and domesticity. He feebly imagines relief from this imprisonment, in the twin forms of painterly dilettantism and romantic fantasy. But in the course of the film, he actually does escape from both his miserable marriage and his own illusions. His murder of Lulu, for which he feels no remorse, is presented as an act of liberation. Legrand ends up as a tramp, homeless, happily déclassé, and utterly unconcerned with the bourgeois appearances and values that had previously ruled his life. Along the way, Renoir also gives us scathing portrayals of the art world (where the artist is entirely at the mercy of the critic, who in turn fawns before the rich collector) and of the procedural bureaucracy of bourgeois justice (in the harrowing sequence where Dédé is tried, falsely convicted, and executed for Lulu's murder).
La chienne is based on a novel by Georges de la Fouchardière, which also served as the source for Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945). The two films have almost identical plots; yet the differences between them are quite large, and instructive for the way that they show up the divergent aesthetics of the two directors. (Renoir and Lang also both made films based on the same Zola novel—La bête humaine (1938) and Human Desire (1954)—but in both cases with somewhat less felicitous results). Lang casts Edward G. Robinson against type in the Michel Simon role, with the wonderfully salacious and slovenly Joan Bennett as the woman, and the even more wonderfully unctuous and sleazy Dan Duryea as the other man. Lang turns the constraints of the Hays Code to his advantage, giving us a noirish account of the protagonist's wounded interiority, helpless sense of inferiority, and morbid wallowing in guilt. There's something almost sadistic about the way that Lang's camera relentlessly tracks Robinson's many humiliations, culminating in his inability even to kill himself, as he is tormented by obsessive hallucinations of his victims’ sexual enjoyment.
What I've just been describing sounds almost impossible to top; yet I'd argue that Renoir more than holds his own in this comparison, and that La chienne is even a greater film than Scarlet Street. In part, this is because of Simon's intense performance, as Legrand both suffers from the constrictions of his experience, and yet ultimately shows himself to be superior to the situations in which he is trapped. Beyond this, there is Renoir's refusal to pull punches, or to palliate his social critique. While Renoir's scrupulous objectivity in La chienne might seem to prefigure the famous maxim (from Rules of the Game) that “tout le monde a ses raisons” (“everyone has their reasons”), in practice this means that the film celebrates Legrand's exodus from the social order. Renoir refuses to condemn Lulu and Dédé, but by the same token he condones Legrand's murdering of them with no remorse, as well as Legrand's final indifference towards the art masterpieces that he has created. Indeed, Renoir's vaunted “humanism” finally comes down to this: an anti-moralism, or rejection of the very possibility of judgment, that is every bit as thorough and demanding as any actual moral code could be. La chienne is a relentlessly iconoclastic film; it is only this which allows it to be, also, a celebration of freedom.
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003), Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009), and Post-Cinematic Affect (forthcoming). He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog>.