Toni (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Pierre Gaut; directed by Jean Renoir; screenplay by Jean Renoir and Carl Einstein; dialogue by Jacques Levert; cinematography by Claude Renoir; edited by Suzanne de Troeye and Marguerite Renoir; starring Charles Blavette, Celia Montalván, Jenny Hélia, Max Dalban, Andrex, Édouard Delmont, and André Kovachevitch. Blu-ray and DVD, B&W, 84 min., 1935. A Criterion Collection release.

“Art is…a small bridge that we build,” Jean Renoir remarked in 1967. “The filmmaker, inasmuch as he’s talented, sometimes manages to build a small bridge between the screen and the audience. And then we’re together, and we create the film together. The audience brings its share, and that share is very important.”

Renoir said that in an installment of the French television series Cineástes de notre temps, and The Criterion Collection has done well to include that episode in its new edition of his minor masterpiece Toni, which begins and ends with views of the imposing railway bridge that the title character, an Italian immigrant in Southern France, has crossed in order to find work and start a fresh life. Released in 1935 to favorable reviews and unfavorable ticket sales, the subtly constructed drama calls for exactly the kind of audience participation that Renoir described. Although its performances are compelling and its rural settings abound with what French film theory calls photogénie, it doesn’t seize the heart with propulsive feelings or strike the eye with fulsome images. Like the protagonist, the movie walks a modest path, balancing cinematic restraint with candor about the relatively rough-hewn manners of its country-bred characters. As in all his greatest work, Renoir invites empathy and involvement without ever forcing the issue. The bridge is there for us to cross, and it’s a rewarding trip, as this film’s ever-rising reputation shows.

The story is deceptively simple, hinging on straightforward events with many-layered implications. In a brief prologue, Toni (Charles Blavette) arrives in rural Martigues, takes a job at a nearby quarry, and moves in with Marie (Jenny Hélia), who runs a rooming house. Leaving the next two years to our imaginations—yes, Renoir expects us to do our share of work—the narrative resumes with Toni now disenchanted with Marie, whom he never married, and newly enchanted with Josefa, a Spanish immigrant whose uncle owns a local farm. Josefa and Toni are apparently headed toward marriage until things take a nasty turn: Toni’s boss at the quarry, Albert (Max Dalban), attacks Josefa in a scene that suggests rape as clearly as a commercial Thirties production could manage.

True to the oppressively patriarchal mores of her time and place, Josefa pretty much shrugs off the assault (“That’s how it is”) and proceeds to wed Albert in the same ceremony where Toni and Marie finally tie the knot. After the off-screen passage of two more years, we see that Albert is as mean and abusive as his earlier behavior predicted, and Josefa joins her cousin Gabi (Andrex) in a plan to steal his stash of money and make a getaway. But everything goes wrong—Albert gets killed, Gabi absconds, and still-smitten Toni tries and fails to cover up Josefa’s part in the disaster, meeting his death on the film’s iconic bridge. The story ends with the arrival of a new crop of immigrants, stressing the cyclical nature of human experience. As often in Renoir, this circularity is both reassuring, in that life goes on and hope blooms anew, and depressing, in that similar cycles of mistakes, misgivings, and miseries are bound to come around again, and again, and again.

Vintage cinema though it is, Toni speaks to our time in interesting ways. In the 1956 essay “Toni and Classicism,” reprinted in a Criterion booklet, Renoir twice calls it a true-crime drama, linking it with a genre hugely popular nowadays. As the critic and scholar Ginette Vincendeau notes in the same booklet, the basic material of the story came to the filmmaker from an old school friend who’d become a police captain and pseudonymous fiction writer; reeling from a series of box-office failures—the classic Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), the still-underrated Chotard and Company (1933), and the mutilated Madame Bovary (1934) among them—Renoir set about making “a squalid episode based on real life,” realizing later that he had created a “poetic love story” almost despite himself, according to his autobiography.

A more important connection between Toni and today is the film’s unsentimental yet sympathetic depiction of a working-class society swelling with immigrants, shot in the region where the story takes place and starring performers from the area, some of them professionally trained and some of them not. “I would be happy,” Renoir says in his 1956 essay, “if you could perceive a little bit of my great love for the Mediterranean community of which Martigues is a concentrate. These workers of different origins, speaking different languages, having come to France to find a slightly better life, are the most authentic heirs to the Greco-Roman civilization that made us what we are.” That eloquently sums up the political valence of what might seem at first glance like a plot-driven romantic melodrama. 

As part of his effort to renovate his career in this period, Renoir tried to erase all signs of technique from Toni, keeping the actors free of makeup, using natural lighting as often as possible, and paying keen attention to nuances of setting and costume. The result has frequently been called a precursor to the Italian neorealist movement of the Forties and Fifties, although Renoir insisted on direct sound recording, whereas the neorealists postdubbed their dialogue tracks in the studio, as a Criterion video essay by Christopher Faulkner points out. In a rather chatty audio commentary, cinephiles Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate perpetuate the idea that the neorealist pioneer Luchino Visconti was an assistant on Toni, but Vincendeau and Faulkner say he was unconnected with the film, further loosening the tie with neorealism. By contrast, the illustrious French filmmaker and playwright Marcel Pagnol was definitely connected with Toni, providing Renoir with equipment and contributing actors trained at his studio near Marseilles, the locale where Toni was filmed. The audio commentary claims that certain shots were done on Pagnol’s soundstages, but Faulkner maintains that the picture was made entirely on location, very much in the neorealist manner, and Renoir makes the same claim in his 1956 essay. Sifting through little contradictions like these is one of the many pleasures to be had from generously produced video releases. The bottom line is that Renoir made Toni while undergoing a “severe attack of realism,” as he puts it in the shortest of the Criterion extras, a filmed introduction to the film made in 1961, and it’s impossible to watch the picture now without thinking of movies like Visconti’s 1948 La terra trema and Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 Stromboli.

As modest and self-effacing as Renoir’s methods are, Toni is splendidly crafted. It moves with a gentle and insinuating rhythm, presenting quietly brilliant sequences that linger in the mind long after the film is over, many of them shot in lengthy takes that allow the actors to build sustained emotional momentum. The most memorable scene comes when Josefa, carrying on her good-humored flirtation with Toni, gets stung by a wasp and implores him to unfasten her dress and suck the venom out of her back, which he willingly proceeds to do—nothing that would imperil a G rating today, but pretty darn sexy under the circumstances, and directed with a focused intensity that brings out the erotic implications of the moment without diminishing its casual, spontaneous tone.

Scenes with a different kind of impact take place at the quarry, a place of steep and jagged stone that evokes the elemental underside of peasant life, diverging starkly from the thriving foliage and leafy footpaths seen elsewhere in the area. Another expressive location is the lake where Marie vainly tries to kill herself when she realizes that Toni will never be a reliable lover; the gracefulness of her somber glide across the mirrorlike surface is a perfect example of Renoir’s ability to unite beauty and melancholy. While the suicide doesn’t happen, violence does erupt at other points, handled with the indirection necessary for Thirties sensibilities but no less resonant for that. This goes especially for the climax, when Josefa bungles her theft of Albert’s money but manages to grab his gun and confront him in a face-off that gains astounding power from Renoir’s abrupt deployment of head-on closeups, a rarity in this resolutely discreet film.

Some critics hold that Toni would rank with Renoir’s very best films if it weren’t overshadowed by The Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, his incontestable masterpieces of 1937 and 1939. That opinion is defensible, but for me a few other great works—the earlier La Chienne (1931) and La Nuit du carrefour (1932), the later La Bête humaine (1938) and A Day in the Country (1946)—have more in the way of narrative and aesthetic power. That said, however, Toni splendidly illustrates Renoir’s gift for drawing out the existential ties between human experiences and the material domain by which they’re surrounded and shaped.

He articulates that facet of his creativity in the Cineástes de notre temps episode, which was directed by the New Wave giant Jacques Rivette and which I can’t resist quoting one more time. Things in the world aren’t separate, Renoir says. “It’s not like there are humans, animals, trees, ponds. There’s a world as a whole.” Asked if he’s a sort of pantheist, he replies that he is: “It’s extremely difficult for me not to see divinities around me and not to imagine that nature is alive and that trees talk to me.” This doesn’t dilute the profound humanism that has always been his artistic trademark, though. “What’s interesting in life are human beings,” he adds. “The tree in itself is uninteresting. Personally, I don’t give a damn about it. It becomes fascinating from the moment I relate it to the people who planted it, to the people who created the civilization around it, or…to my countrymen or to the emotions I’ve felt, the memories and recollections it brings back.” Weaving the human and the natural into an unassuming yet elegant matrix, the modest Toni exemplifies the intuitive genius of an unsurpassed screen artist.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen books on film. 

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1