Summary
Upset at having lost his dog, a tramp named Boudu throws himself from a bridge into the
River Seine at Paris. He is saved from drowning by a bourgois, hyper-respectable
bookseller, Monsieur Lestingois. Always keen to do a good turn, Lestingois offers
to let Boudu stay in his home, but his maid and his wife are far from happy. Within
a short while, the calm, orderly household is turned upside down as Boudu makes a nonsense
of Lestingois’s attempts to civilise him. Worse, Lestingois’s nocturnal
visits to his maid’s bedroom are disrupted, and Boudu succeeds in making a dishonest
woman of Madame Lestingois. There is only one moral solution to the problem, decides
Monsieur Lestingois: Boudu must marry the maid!
Review
Boudu sauvé des eaux is amongst Renoir’s most human and certainly
funniest films. It is a warm-hearted satire on the hypocrisies of bourgeois
family life, covering some of the ground which Renoir later tackles more directly
in his later film, La Règle du Jeu. Renoir uses Boudu as a kind of
torch light to show up the self-righteousness and shallowness of supposedly good
moral city folk and to suggest that great gestures of charity are little more than
a divertissement for the well-off.
Michel Simon plays the character of Boudu as if he had lived the part all his life.
In a brilliant performance that is both sympathetic and extremely funny, Simon displays
a genuineness that never lets us doubt for a moment that he has only one desire:
to be a tramp. Small wonder that Jean Vigo, having seen this film, would see
Michel Simon as the ideal actor to play Père Jules in his film L’Atalante
.
© James Travers 2002
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