A Fine Historical Movie From One of the Greatest of Filmmakers
In Casablanca, there's a scene in Rick's Café Américain where Nazis sing a German song, only to be drowned out by the house band playing and the café's other patrons joining in singing a French anthem. The symbolism is, of course, that democracy will prevail over fascism. The song that represents democracy here is "La Marseillaise," which dates back to the French Revolution.
Between his masterpieces Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Jean Renoir made another outstanding film, La Marseillaise (1938), which is about the part of the French Revolution taking place when the title song first became popular. In the movie, Renoir celebrates the common man bringing an end to the feudal system and moving toward the idea of a nation based on principles of liberty and equality.
Renoir gives La Marseillaise the form of an upbeat spectacle, but he avoids clichés and confounds our expectations. The movie consists of a series of thematically related vignettes leading up to the climactic battle where revolutionaries take Tuileries Palace in 1792.
Commoners From Marseilles Spread an Anthem
The characters in La Marseillaise that Renoir wants us to sympathize with most are wage-earners from Marseilles, particularly the mason Bomier (Edmond Ardisson) and the customs officer Arnaud (Andrex). Bomier, Arnaud and others join the 500-man all-volunteer Marseilles battalion and make the long march to Paris. Along the way the battalion sings a stirring, but not widely known, song then called "The Hymn of the Rhine Army." Over time that song caught on as the revolutionary anthem, but because it had become generally associated with the Marseillais (as the people of Marseilles are called), the song title that stuck was "La Marseillaise."
In the film, the men of the Marseilles battalion have little, if any, control over the events engulfing them that transformed France from a monarchy to a republic. Renoir uses these men as a way for us to understand what it was like to be caught up in the sweep of history that would eventually affect the whole world.
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
Throughout the time period covered by the movie, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are still king and queen of France. Except for the film's initial scene, the royal family lives at Tuileries Palace in Paris. During this phase of the revolution, an attempt is being made to develop a constitution that specifies a form of government where power is shared by the king and an elected national assembly (or parliament).
The king and queen are only on camera roughly 10 percent of the time in La Marseillaise, yet they are memorable characters. Pierre Renoir, the director's brother, plays Louis XVI, and Lise Delamare of the Comédie Française portrays Marie Antoinette. While Jean Renoir's sympathies clearly lie with the common people, he nonetheless humanizes the king and queen. Louis XVI is depicted as inept, but not as a tyrant. Marie Antoinette comes across as being cold and calculating, but not at all frivolous. Renoir gives us monarchs who, even as they are being swept away by the tide of history, are dignified and brave.
One of the things that made Renoir such a great filmmaker was his ability to capture big emotions in small moments. For example, with the revolutionaries about to attack Tuileries Palace, the royal family walks down a tree-lined lane, and the king and queen's children pause to play in a pile of leaves. The doomed Louis XVI takes the hand of his young son and remarks with sadness, "So many leaves. They've fallen early this year."
For Killing a Pigeon, a Man Could Be Hanged
In the movie, Renoir dramatizes the outrageousness of the feudal system by showing an incident involving an old peasant called Cabri (Mountain Goat), who lives in a village in Provence. Cabri is a poor man who ekes out a living growing crops, but pigeons are devouring his harvest. When he kills one of the birds, he is arrested on the grounds that only noblemen have hunting rights. The local seigneur who presides over the case considers the dead pigeon important because it is a symbol of feudal rights, and thus Cabri has committed a crime for which he must be sentenced to the gallows.
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