Jean Renoir's Boudu sauvé des eaux | Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

 

The film critic André Bazin said that the charm of Boudu sauvé des eaux is in the glorification of vulgarity, that the film is 'magnificently obscene'. Well, if it has ever been possible to define 'vulgarity' and 'obscenity' such an imaginary definition has obviously changed radically in the last eighty years. Nevertheless, such viewpoints are still understandable today in relation to Jean Renoir's film, which over the years has continued to attract interest. Originally adapted from René Fauchois's 1919 play of the same name, Boudu sauvé des eaux has been remade as Paul Masursky's Down and Out in BeverleyHills (1986) and Gérard Jugnot's Boudu (2005).

Starring in this suberb satire on the French middle class are Michel Simon as the ungrateful and rebellous tramp Boudu; Charles Granval as the kindly bookseller Édouard Lestingois who (out of the vision and earshot of his testy wife Emma (Marcelle Hainia)) gives two of Voltaire's books to an impecunious student whom he 'knows': his name is 'Youth'; and Anne-Marie (Séverine Lerczinska), the Lestinois' maid Lestingois has a sexual penchant for.

And then along comes Boudu, who has lost his dog and throws himself off the Pont des Arts into the Seine. Lestingois has seen this from an upper floor of Quai de Conti where his shop and home is, and dashes out to save Boudu and brings him back into his home, where he manages to revive him. Lestingois's home is now Boudu's, and the satire starts.

Lestingois wants to rehabilitate Boudu, change him into a respectable bourgeois individual like himself. Initially full of good middle-class intentions, his good will begins to fade as Boudu spits out the wine he's offered, in fact spits regularly, although the limit comes when Boudu (symbolically) spits in pages of Physiologie du mariage by Balzac. But Boudu has won Anne-Marie over, even won his saviour's wife over by an initial rape that turned into a success sex scene (unseen apart from in Emma's eyes, of course).

But all the same, the only thing to do with this wild creature who makes a mess of the kitchen and even polishes his shoes on his hosts' bedspread (especially after he's won on the lottery) is to marry him off to Anne-Marie. Which takes place, although Boudu overturns the canoe, the people swim to the shore, Boudu changes into a scarecrow's clothing and goes back to his former life, although presumed dead. And this of course gives the title (particularly in French) two meanings: Boudu's been saved from the waters: from drowning literally or figurately from being destroyed by marriage.