ジャン・ルノワール——旧世界の終わりを誰よりも早く映し出した映画監督

ジャン・ルノワール

Photo: Studio Harcourt / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

生年	1894年9月15日 Montmartre, Paris, France
没年	1979年2月12日 (84)
職業	映画監督
代表作	大いなる幻影, ゲームの規則, ピクニック
受賞	2 アカデミー賞

In the months before Germany invaded France, one of its greatest directors was already in exile — not from occupation, but from the audience that had booed his latest film out of cinemas. La Règle du jeu had been released, attacked, and mutilated by its own distributor. The man who made it, Jean Renoir, left for Italy on what he described as a tourist trip. He never permanently returned. What his countrymen dismissed as a failed comedy about a weekend hunting party turned out, on its many subsequent reappraisals, to have been the most exact X-ray of a civilization on the verge of collapse that cinema has ever produced.

He was born into a particular kind of abundance. His father’s studio in Montmartre was full of models, light, and the smell of linseed oil; Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted the same surfaces — skin, water, silk, afternoon — with a patience his second son would not inherit. Jean Renoir was wounded in the First World War, spent months on crutches, became briefly obsessed with ceramics, and only came to filmmaking because he wanted a vehicle for his first wife, the actress Catherine Hessling. The motive was personal before it was artistic. It always was with Renoir.

His early silent films show a director learning by doing, not always elegantly. But something shifted in the early 1930s. La Chienne (1931), shot in a Paris that felt lived-in rather than lit, established the approach: real locations, actors free to move, a camera that followed human bodies instead of framing them. Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) went further, letting Michel Simon’s anarchic vagrant wreck a bourgeois household from the inside. The film plays as farce, but the joke is the one Renoir would tell for the rest of his career: the rules that govern polite society are agreed-upon fictions, and anyone who refuses to pretend otherwise becomes a scandal.

Toni (1935) moved toward something rawer — a film about immigrant laborers in the south of France, shot on location with non-professional actors, that anticipated Italian neorealism by a decade. Then came the period that would define his reputation permanently. La Grande Illusion (1937) used a World War I prisoner-of-war story to argue that class solidarity cuts across national borders more reliably than patriotism. It was the first foreign-language film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Joseph Goebbels banned it as cinematic public enemy number one.

La Bête humaine (1938), adapted from Zola, delivered a grimmer verdict: desire is the engine beneath civilization’s surface, and social structures don’t tame it, they simply give it tracks to run on. Jean Gabin’s locomotive driver, gripping his cab in the dark outside Lyon, became one of cinema’s most indelible portraits of a man undone by what he cannot control. Then La Règle du jeu (1939) arrived as the synthesis: a country-house weekend, a rabbit hunt, an intricate machinery of social performances — and underneath, Renoir’s quiet insistence that everyone in the frame knows the game is rigged and agrees to play it anyway. A member of the audience at the premiere tried to set fire to a newspaper. The film was hissed, cut, withdrawn, and ultimately banned during the Occupation.

The standard account of Renoir’s Hollywood years treats them as an exile that softened him — as if the maker of La Grande Illusion became a studio craftsman once he reached American shores. The evidence doesn’t support this. The Southerner (1945) is one of the great American films about labor and land, shot with a directness no Hollywood contemporary attempted. The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), adapting Mirbeau’s novel, carries a political savagery that French cinema of the period had largely abandoned. The problem with the Hollywood years is not the films themselves — it’s that the studio system never knew what to do with him, and the feeling was mutual.

When he returned to European production with The River (1951) — shot in India, in Technicolor, in a register so different from the 1930s films that it bewilders critics expecting a match — Renoir signaled that the argument he was making had always been about attention, not ideology. French Cancan (1955) and The Golden Coach (1952) opened into a late style of theatrical self-consciousness: stage-flat colors, performers who play at being performers, Renoir folding his father’s Impressionism back into the image at the level of light and surface rather than content.

He wrote his autobiography in 1974 — My Life and My Films — with the equanimity of a man who had watched his most reviled work become canon. The director who was told in 1939 that he had made a film the French public was unprepared for found himself, in the 1960s, cited by every director of the nouvelle vague as the one precedent that made everything they did possible. François Truffaut dedicated his first feature to him. Godard called him the greatest of all. What Renoir himself said about it was simpler: every director has only one film they’re making, over and over. His was about the impossibility of knowing another person — which was why painting, his father’s art, had never been quite enough.