TONI Movie Review

Toni (Charles Blavette) is an Italian farm worker who comes to Provence in the 1930s looking for work. He falls in love, but the woman he adores (Jenny Hélia) marries Toni's new boss (Max Dalban),a brute whose subsequent death leads to Toni being accused of a murder he didn't commit. Though made in 1934, Jean Renoir's film—shot in natural locations with a high degree of realism—foreshadowed the Italian neorealist cinema that would emerge after World War II. Despite the soap opera—ish aspects of the plot, the movie's visual power and breathtaking sincerity seem revolutionary today, particularly when compared to other sound films of the period. Renoir succeeded in his aims, which he stated in an introduction to the film's 1956 reissue: “No stone was left unturned to make our work as close as possible to a documentary. Our ambition was that the public would be able to imagine that an invisible camera had filmed the phases of a conflict without the characters unconsciously swept along by their being aware of its presence.” The simple, affecting cinematography is by Claude Renoir, the director's nephew. So influential was this film that Truffaut, Godard, Melville, Resnais, and many of France's other New Wave pioneers frequently described themselves as “the children of Toni.”

NEXT STOP … Rules of the Game, Harvest, Greed

1934 90m/B FR Charles Blavette, Jenny Helia, Edouard Delmont, Celia Montalvan; D: Jean Renoir; W: Jean Renoir; C: Claude Renoir; M: Paul Bozzi. VHS DVT