Minority View: The Human Beast by Jean Renoir blog
Jean Renoir is a director associated with realist cinema and his films cannot be called ‘˜generic' - in the strict sense - although this will need to be elaborated upon. Genre films are, by and large, self-conscious works that refer to film convention while realist cinema is concerned with producing a ‘˜true' picture of the world. While genre cinema cannot exist without precedents, realist filmmakers like to believe that their vision of the world is not mediated by other films. Renoir's The Human Beast (1938) is generally considered a noir film but it shows the difference between the two approaches (realist cinema and the genre film) although Renoir's film is thematically similar to noir.
Noir is a generic category that came out of formulaic ‘˜pulp' literature and can perhaps be said to be about ordinary men drawn into violent crime. The sub-category in which Renoir's film can be accommodated was perhaps invented by James M Cain with his novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). In films that work by this formula (which Cain described as the ‘˜love-rack'), an honest man enters into a sexual relationship with a married woman - the ‘˜femme fatale' - and the two kill the woman's husband, usually for his money. The deed is done but the two are now aware of the others propensities. They therefore become deeply suspicious of each other - until they receive their comeuppance.
Renoir was perhaps not aware of Cain the novelist and his film is based on a novel by Emile Zola who belonged to the realist (or rather, ‘˜naturalist') school of writing. He wanted to show how generations of drunkenness in the working class can ‘˜corrupt its blood' so that even an honest man who abstains can carry the genetic burden. Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin), we are told at the beginning of Renoir's film, has strange fits of depression and he can also commit violent acts which would be unimaginable in his normal, conscious state. Jacques Lantier drives a railway engine and when the film begins the engine has just broken down at Le Havre. The other strand in the story involves the station master Roubaud and his wife Séverine (Simone Simon). Séverine has an upper-class ‘˜godfather' named Grandmorin, to whom her mother was maid and she herself, mistress. Roubaud discovers this and coerces her into a plot to murder Roubaud after inducing him to be on a train. Roubaud senses that his wife is slipping away from him and this is also his way of binding them together. Lantier happens to see the two on the train after the murder has been committed and soon understands their involvement in the crime. The two however understand this and Séverine befriends Lantier and, as may be expected, soon tries to entice him into killing her husband.
The ‘˜femme fatale' in noir is more a type than an individual and this is consistent with its formulaic nature. The archetypal example is perhaps Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) which works by the same formula developed by Cain. Where Séverine is different from a Cain heroine is in the way she is brought to life. Séverine seems to be aware of her scheming ways and attributes it to her childhood. At one point her husband asks Séverine if her mother was Grandmorin's mistress as well, which means she could be his daughter. Séverine is horrified, which is when we understand the nature of her relationship with Grandmorin. Secondly, unlike the heroine of Double Indemnity whose scheming nature is made evident from the beginning, Séverine seems to actually love Lantier, although in her own way. She emerges as someone who has been so ill-treated that is hardened and there are few things she is not capable of. When Séverine makes a promise or an assertion, we cannot be certain that she is not being sincere at that moment although, later on, her acts may contradict it.
The same observation can perhaps be made of Lantier himself and of the other characters. Jean Gabin is a star who is endowed with an enormous presence but not for a moment do we sense that he is an actor and not the actual driver of a railway engine. The ways of the working class are also brilliantly caught. Lantier's colleague on the engine Pecqueux has been sleeping with another friend's sister. When the brother beats his sister's for her relationship with Pecqueux, the latter wonders why a brother - rather than a husband - should behave this way. These details do not have much to do with the ‘˜plot' but they add to the film. The performances are always dazzling because they don't seem to be performances at all. The camera catches the milieu to perfection and life on a train has never been deal with so evocatively.
The characteristic that makes The Human Beast essentially different from conventional noir is perhaps that the path taken by the narrative goes beyond the restrictions of the formula. The sense of inexorable doom that characterizes noir is absent in Renoir's film. Where the noir film is ‘˜closed' by its strict conventions, Renoir's film is open to the world. The lives of the characters went along this path but there were others that they were open to because human choices cannot be exhausted - although they are often mysterious. People act in all kinds of ways and some of them are vile. But, as Renoir once remarked, "The terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons."
