1955 Directed by Jean Renoir
Nineteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in Jean Renoir’s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays the wily impresario Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beautiful women—an Egyptian belly-dancer and a naive working girl turned cancan star.
Jean Gabin Françoise Arnoul María Félix Anna Amendola Jean-Roger Caussimon Dora Doll Giani Esposito Michel Piccoli Édith Piaf Franco Pastorino Cora Vaucaire Anne-Marie Mersen Gaston Modot Patachou Albert Rémy Rosy Varte Jean Sylvère Pâquerette André Philip René Pascal Pierre Olaf André Numès Fils Michele Nadal Jean Mortier Annik Morice Pierre Moncorbier Anna-Marie Mersen Paul Mercey Palmyre Levasseur Show All…
French Can-Can, Only the French Can, French Can Can, 프렌치 캉캉, フレンチ・カンカン, Fransk cancan, Ranskalainen Cancan, Mulató a Montmartre-on, Fröjdernas gata
It pretty much covers everything - everyone is a performer, reality is more theatrical than theatre, and theatre is more real than reality. Yet at the same time, to be a performer as once professions necessitates one be outside of life. It's not beautiful nor tragic, because it is both at once. The building of the Moulin Rouge, and we watch how everything becomes? how things be? How things are? Renoir's greatest work by a gigantic margin (little theatre close tho) and also his most complex - more and more so after repeat viewings. Self-expression is self-exploitation: to perform and to be an artist are one and the same, and to do either it is necessary to separate oneself from…
This and The Young Girls of Rochefort are more than enough to prove that the French win at musicals. French Cancan sees master director Jean Renoir at his most hideously overlooked, so I’d strongly recommend it on that basis alone. Other reasons? Only the fact it’s in the runnings for the greatest 50s Hollywood pastiche ever made; a confounding visual recreation of Hitchcock’s trademark Technicolor thrillers. The colours of this one are beyond belief; pastel wallpapers and painted backdrops whisking us away into its unashamed sentimentality, but unlike Jacques Demy, Renoir isn’t afraid to uncage his dark side when the opportunity arises. The heavier themes explored here range from mutual heartbreak, to self-loathing, systemic misogyny, and postwar political relations, but…
Jean Renoir offers a playful and colourful extravaganza that follows Henri Danglard (Jean Gabin), an owner of a cafe, losing his money and travelling to Montmartre. The comedy-drama exhibits the vast experience that Renoir had obtained and was the first film he shot for a French studio after fifteen years of wartime exile from Occupied France. Everything in the movie feels cranked up a notch as Danglard finds out that an old-fashioned dance, the Cancan, is still being performed and applauded by the people. He determinedly becomes a theatre producer and transforms a modest laundress Nini (Françoise Arnoul) into a star at the Moulin Rouge.
The Technicolor is gorgeous with Cora Vaucaire and Patachou both performing songs in cameo roles,…
The moment French Cancan began, I thought of Powell and Pressburger's magnificent trifle, Oh ... Rosalinda!. At first, the connection was merely superficial — both films are cheerfully artificial, music-filled, lovingly crafted Technicolor delights. Gradually, however, the links between the two became more numerous and more compelling, to the degree that it's now impossible for me to separate the two films in my mind.
Both were released in 1955, with Jean Renoir's film a period piece that takes place during the Belle Epoque, while the other is based on a story set during the Belle Epoque, but pulled forward to the modern era. And, in addition to their obvious shared candy colors, both works also revolve around aging impresarios of…
Here, you can experience the tremendous joy felt by director Jean Renoir upon returning to France after more than a decade away in America. It's clear that he wanted to celebrate everything he had been missing, from bread, cheese and wine to the gaiety of Paris nightlife and the special bonds that exist among entertainers. As a vehicle for his exuberance and delight, Renoir chose to adapt an idea put forward by writer André-Paul Antoine about the 1889 establishment of the famous nightclub "Moulin Rouge."
It is pure coincidence that this film came out not long after John Huston's Oscar-winning production about the same Montmartre landmark. The American director's version concentrated on the role of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,…
LOVE! Jean Renoir does to film what his famous impressionist father does to painting— bring dazzling color and vibrancy into Parisian life.
jean renoir's SANDY WEXLER
wasn't really expecting this to be partially about gentrification but it's one of the more astute films i've seen about the intersection between art and commerce, and perhaps more could be parsed out from it about the very concept of "slumming it." methinks a perhaps more savage contemporary version could be made about that crown heights restaurant with the 40 oz rose in paper bags and the fake bullet holes.
obviously this gets well-deserved attention for its astounding use of color and production design, but i was also taken with the editing; that final sequence, in which the "lowbrow" and antiquated entertainment of the cancan comes close to sublimity in a flurry of frocks and legs,…
María Félix is the highlight of this candy colored sorbet of Gay 90s Paris, full of charm, wit, and love for Parisian art of past and present, love that culminates in cameos of the famous French singers of the 50s performing in period-era venues, the most famous being a lovely cameo by the great Edith Piaf.
I tend to enjoy the "backstage musical" structure, one that works to perfection in Busby Berkeley films like Footlight Parade or Gold Diggers of 1933 or other great films like Born to Dance or The Young Girls of Rochefort. French Cancan serves as a nice in-between in film history, after the Hollywood backstage musicals of the 30s but before The Young Girls, a nice bridge that draws inspiration from the 30s flicks while in turn inspiring Jacques Demy.
nadine: this is alain resnais' sandy wexler
etan: it's his speed racer
meanwhile going through my head...
no but this movie is an all-timer. pulls off so many things -- art, performance, and the business of it, love, class, etc... and the colors! it's perfect. watched this back to back with ZOUZOU -- a double feature of laundry girls going into the show biz.
35mm. Quad Cinema.
Renoir is a director who just gets me. He knows exactly what I want from a film and delivers just that. This film is more than a beautifully rendered series of shots and a tribute to art itself, it’s a total blast! There is so much life packed into this and the heartfelt affection Renoir has for his characters and the world he’s created makes it such an appealing and warming watch.
It’s a celebration of love, of life, of community, and most importantly of dance. For our protagonists, the art of dance is life. They laugh as they polka together…they make immortal friendships as they cancan… they fall in love as they waltz.
And as the title implies, the…
More like "French cancan't" am I right?
Wait, no, what's the opposite of that?
Right, "French cancan", that's it.
Renoir does cutting: Esther singing, Danglard watching Esther, Nini watching Danglard watching Esther: A love triangle in montage (this is the smallest and least dwelt upon romantic entanglement, the two main ones are, in typical Renoir fashion, four-part romances, rather than the boring old triangle); the final triumphant performance intercut with Danglard backstage, too nervous(?) to watch, but riveted by the sound of the show and (more importantly) the audience's reaction.
Dance class designed to invoke Degas, but it reminded me of Lau Kar-leung just as much. Gotta practice to make art, even art built around something as primal as flipping…
