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The bucket of bathroom water in the bourgeois study, a candid joke exhaustively realized in just one set and one hour. "A chamber pot?" "Yeah, unless you're launching a new line of hats." Papa (Jacques Louvigny) runs a porcelain business, frets about a deal with the French Army, can't find Hebrides in the dictionary. Maman (Marguerite Pierry) pads around in curlers, rumpled peignoir and drooping stockings, more concerned about their constipated 8-year-old son (Sacha Tarride) than about the guest of honor coming to lunch. Asked to examine their boy's ink-blackened tongue, the illustrious client (Michel Simon) peers through his monocle in polite disbelief. "Go on, blow in the gentleman's face." Feydeau, but also Juvenal, nothing but humanity's scatological wholeness for Jean Renoir. (An off-screen toilet flushes loud and clear, thus the wonders of talkies.) The Department of War is not ready for the combat at home, disorder reigns for the benefit of Boudu sauvé des Eaux. "Mom, what's a cuckold?" The not quite unbreakable product is thrown from the back of the frame toward the audience to give the depth of the screen, the paterfamilias holds the chamber pot aloft with mock-grandeur and Renoir's camera tilts with marvelous abruptness to accommodate the actor's gesture. The brat gets the peppermint candy and the stuffed shirt gulps the glass of mineral oil, the straying missus (Olga Valéry) and the flirty maid (Nicole Fernandez) flit in and out of the wings. (Even in long shot, Fernandel's equine mug is unmistakable as the perfidious cousin.) "Sorry you have to witness this little domestic scene!" "Not at all, this is charming." The cream of the jest falls to Buñuel in Le Fantôme de la Liberté. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |