Boudu Saved from Drowning

Jean Renoir's 1932 film, built around Michel Simon as Boudu, a tramp who throws himself into the Seine after losing his dog. The source is a play by René Fauchois, and the biggest departure from it is the ending. In the play the central figure is the bookseller, not Boudu, and the tramp is finally converted to bourgeois civilisation and sees the error of his ways. Renoir's Boudu is not. The bookseller Édouard Lestingois, played by Charles Granval, pulls him out. Lestingois is a liberal, well-meaning, cultivated bourgeois, and he takes the man he saved into his house. What he expects is gratitude. Boudu does not supply it. He eats, spits on the floor, wipes his feet on a book, sleeps with his host's wife and dismantles the household's order. The film neither punishes nor reforms him. That is the point: Renoir draws the poor man not as a victim in need of rescue but as someone who refuses the gesture of rescue. The wish to own that sits beneath charity becomes visible as a result. The ending is unusually uncompromising for its period. After the wedding the punt tips over, everyone scrambles ashore, and Boudu lets the current take him and disappears. While the others mourn him as drowned, he swaps clothes with a scarecrow and sets out on the road again. Michel Simon's performance is among the most cited in French cinema. Paul Mazursky moved the story to America in 1986 as Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Who it is for: viewers who like class comedy and the loose, natural texture of 1930s French cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who needs to like the characters. Boudu is coarse, selfish and at times directly repellent, and the film does not soften it.