Filmmakers on film: Robert Gudiguian on Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935)
by Sheila Johnston
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
August 06, 2005, Saturday
In high summer, one’s thoughts turn naturally to the lazy pleasures
of Provence. Tourist guides and newspaper travel sections teem with
paeans to the scent of lavender, the chirp of cicadas and the tang of
a good bouillabaisse washed down with chilled ros. Anyone who knows
his Peter Mayle or his Marcel Pagnol (and the highly successful films
of Pagnol’s work such as Jean de Florette, Manon des sources and La
Gloire de mon pre) will recognise the stereotype.
Robert Gudiguian has a completely different vision. The son of a
docker, he grew up in L’Estaque, an attractive but very down-to-earth
coastal town just outside Marseilles. And much of his work celebrates
the area’s vibrant working-class culture, in warm romantic comedies
such as Marius and Jeanette as well as in gritty portraits of the
run-down inner city such as The Town Is Quiet.
It’s this earthy, intimate quality that Gudiguian prizes in his film
of choice: Toni, a relatively little-known early work by Jean Renoir.
“I was 13 when I first saw it,” he says, “and had always thought that
the cinema was just about escapism and adventure – about Tarzan or
Hercules, pirates or cowboys. But here was a beautiful film that I
enjoyed a lot, and whose hero was a man just like my father. It was
shot very close to where I lived and the characters spoke with the same
accent as me. I was shocked, in the good sense of the word, and also
touched that people like my neighbours and family could be in a film.”
Toni is a gentle Italian working in a quarry near Marseilles who falls
for Josepha, a flirtatious, spirited Spanish girl. When a rival beats
him to her hand in marriage, he settles reluctantly for his landlady
instead, but neither couple is happy and it all ends badly. Yet this
stark, melodramatic story is also the backdrop for a marvellously
vivid and lively evocation of the immigrant community.
“Renoir was inspired freely by a real crime that happened in the
1920s, a murder motivated by a mix of racism and jealousy. He filmed
mainly on location and used a lot of real people as extras to play
the workers and peasants. Professional actors don’t come from the same
milieu and rarely have the same faces and bodies. In that sense, Toni
was a forerunner of Italian neo-realism, 10 years avant la lettre –
Luchino Visconti was Renoir’s assistant on it. It’s a real milestone.”
But surely Pagnol – who produced Toni – had already distilled the
essence of Provence in Marius, Fanny and Csar, his celebrated trilogy
of plays set around Marseilles’s famous Old Port, which were filmed
by himself, Alexander Korda and Marc Allgret in the early 1930s?
“It’s not the same,” ripostes Gudiguian instantly. “For a start, Pagnol
comes from the theatre and his approach is to set up the camera in
one position and have the actors recite the text – which, by the way,
isn’t always a bad way of making a film. Renoir is much freer. He’s
not a formalist or a stylist, but he uses all the resources of cinema.
‘Look at how Toni begins. It’s about a wave of immigration, and
he uses a tracking shot to follow the workers as they arrive in
France off the train and walk along towards the town, singing. The
shot itself looks a bit like the movement of a wave, and, of course,
also evokes the Mediterranean itself. At the end, the film comes full
circle with an identical shot: the wave of immigration will continue
despite the tragedy we have just witnessed.”
Gudiguian’s father was a first-generation immigrant from Armenia,
while his mother came from Germany, so it is no surprise that he
appreciates this aspect of Toni. “TheMarseilles region is a real
melting pot, and Renoir acknowledges it,” he says. “Pagnol never did.
His films show peasants or small business owners, whereas Toni is
about the working classes. I’ve often said as a kind of provocation
that the quintessential Marseilles film was made by a Parisian.”
Yet Toni is far from a slab of dry agit-prop, and Gudiguian finds in
it the same joie de vivre that illuminated the art of Auguste Renoir,
the director’s father. “His films are very much like his father’s
paintings: they have the same sensuality, gaiety and benevolence,
even when he makes tragedies. He loves people and, in that sense,
I believe he’s been an influence on me.
“In my favourite scene, Josepha gets stung by a wasp on the back of her
neck. It hurts, but Toni is there and he sucks out the sting; there’s
a little game around it. It’s an extraordinary, very erotic moment
which sums up the beginnings of a love affair and its combination of
pain and pleasure. It’s so natural and yet has an infinite grace and
lightness that filmmakers rarely achieve.”
Gudiguian recently left his provenal stamping ground for Paris’s
corridors of power. The Last Mitterrand (now on release) observes the
final weeks of the late French President. “It could hardly be more
different from my previous films,” says the director. “But it was
an exceptional offer – the combination of Mitterrand and the great
actor Michel Bouquet.”
He has travelled even further for his next project, which he is
currently shooting, about an Armenian-Frenchwoman who travels east in
search of her roots. “I haven’t changed direction,” he insists. “I’ve
strayed off the path but I’ll return to it. After this, I’m going
back home to my own people.”
Robert Gudiguian Writer-director Born Marseilles, 1953 Selected films
Marius and Jeannette (1997) Where the Heart Is (1998) Charge! (2000)
The Town Is Quiet (2000) The Last Mitterrand (2005) Filmmakers on
film archive: