BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING Movie Review

Boudu Sauve des Eaux

If it's true that no good deed goes unpunished, perhaps there's a good reason. When the tramp called Boudu (Michel Simon) jumps into the Seine at the beginning of Jean Renoir's great Boudu Saved from Drowning, the bookseller who rescues him is sure that he's doing the right and decent thing. He takes Boudu home with him, proud to offer this pathetic outcast of society the comfort and privilege of his middle-class home, but the man he has rescued stubbornly refuses to be grateful. Moreover, he not only seduces the bookseller's wife but his maid, too (what nerve—the bookseller was trying to get to her himself). Renoir's classic comic fable about bourgeois expectations and, yes, liberal pieties, is still a great, rude, welcome blast of fresh air. Once seen, it's impossible to ever again be seriously surprised about a favor not returned or a dinner invitation not reciprocated. Michel Simon is so perfect as the gloriously independent Boudu that the full achievement of Renoir's casual-seeming cheer for anarchy may go almost unnoticed: it shouldn't. Boudu Saved from Drowning is a classic and timeless moral fable—a perfect illustration of Renoir's oft-quoted observation that “the terrible thing about this world is that everybody has his reasons.” (Modern American version: “You want gratitude? Get a puppy.”) Boudu was indeed the basis for Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills. I like Paul Mazursky, but Boudu is incomparable.

NEXT STOP … La Chienne, Rules of the Game, Toni

1932 87m/B FR Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Jean Daste, Marcelle Hainia, Severine Lerczinska, Jacques Becker; D: Jean Renoir; W: Jean Renoir; C: Marcel Lucien. VHS INT, MRV, DVT