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Boudu Saved from Drowning (The Criterion Collection)

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The opening scenes of 'Boudu Saved from drowning' contrast the urbane bookseller Lestingois with the hirsute titular tramp. The former presides over a haven of super-civilisation on the banks of the Seine, surrounded by rare books, paintings, statues, the best that the best minds have thought and created. he is using the skill absorbed from this culture, however, to beguile his impressionable mistress, the young maid Anne-Marie - in this case classical rhetoric not only disguising basic natural urges, but actually replacing them, Lestingois' appetite more evident that his capabilities.

Boudu, on the other hand, is first seen in a park, caressing his dog, singing snatches of song, linked to the natural and populist. These two collide when Lestingois rescues a suicidal Boudu, and invites him into his home, where he is soon smashing plates, smearing shoe polish over the satin and spiiting in rare Balzac novels. The movement of the film seems to be towards the greater bourgeoisification of Boudu - new clothes, Samsonian hair cut, ennobling by money and marriage. But the film actually revolves around sex. The film starts with a Greek tableau of Pan chasing a nymph, cut to Lestingois and Anne-Marie. Boudu begins replacing his benefactor, not by accumulating bourgeois habits, but by displaying the sexual prowess the self-styled Priapus Lestingois lacks (the latter has no children).

70 years on, 'Boudu' remains a shockingly funny comedy, provocatively hostile to the soul-stultifying deceptions, compromises and resignations of the bourgoisie. If this makes the film sound aridly polemical, than you don't know Renoir - the slouchy, amused Lestingois is the most sympathetic character in the movie, cultured, tolerant, benevolent - his crime, if you like, it the bourgeois expectation that the rescued Boudu should be grateful and hence dependent. Even the women reveal depths beyond the initial caricatures - Mme Lestingois is given a beautiful epiphany, lying dejected on her bed, suddenly awoken by street music, taken back somewhere we've no access to. Concepts of death and rebirth, heaven and hell, destruction and continuity recur, filtered through the overarching metaphor of the river.

The film is a strange mixture of the antique and the modern. The documentary-like aspects of the film, the real-location shooting of pre-war Paris, its parks, cafes, pageants, music, rivers, boats etc., are ironically the most 'dated', in the sense that they capture a world long since vanished. The theatrical artificality of the film, by contrast, is the clue to its modernity - the division of the narrative into music-signalled acts; the farce-like plot; the complex composition of domestic and exterior space. The film's motifs revolve around spectators looking at unfolding dramas, windows framing action and dividing characters from life. There is a remarkable sequence in the park, where a plein-air location is turned into a vast, endless stage set, through which characters wander in and out. Far from restricting the cinematic quality of the film, this theatricality liberates it, opening up the rigidity of the frame, of one viewpoint, intimating whole worlds beyond it.

These tensions - between civilisation and nature, high and popular culture, sympathy and satire, ancient and modern, documentary and theatre - result in one of Renoir's, and cinema's, greatest films.

Turning off the water in the sink is as alien an idea to Boudu as not spitting on the dining room rug. Watching him try to clean bootblack from his hands is to watch the destruction of a kitchen. He's as oblivious to others as a strong wind blowing through a garden. One critic said the character of Boudu was like a ball in a pinball machine. Boudu (Michel Simon) is a scruffy tramp who jumps off a bridge in Paris when he loses his dog. Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval) is a chubby, middle-aged bookseller, very much a member of the bourgeoisie, who rushes out of his shop, leaps into the river, saves Boudu and takes him into his home. Lestingois has a wife who is proper and cool. He employs a maid who is lusty and accommodating. Boudu will change their lives.

Boudu is an anarchic force of nature, stuffing his sardine dinner into his mouth with his hands and spitting his wine onto the floor. For Lestingois, who at first is pleased with himself for his heroism and with taking in such a specimen of the lower class, life becomes complicated and frustrating. He enjoys his trysts with the maid, Anne-Marie, but he recognizes he's getting a bit old. "She's charming," he says, "but last night I fell asleep before I could join her. No doubt about it, I'm growing old. My pipes are weary, and soon some shepherd will lure her with his youthful flute." Boudu, however, soon wearies of sleeping in a bed and takes to sleeping in the hall, next to Anne-Marie's door. "I get bored all alone in my room," Anne Marie tells Lestingois. "I'm not exactly jumping for joy in my room, either," he says. "Are you sorry you saved him?" she asks. "At night, I am."

Madame Lestingois, however, once Boudu is convinced to get a haircut and wear a proper suit, may not be quite the piece of ice she appears to be. When Boudu has the opportunity to closely inspect a small birthmark on Madame Lestingois' chest, well, it's not long before Madame Lestingois hears trumpets playing.

Boudu remains the same, wrapped up in his own world and with his own behavior, refusing a favor, turning back an innocent inquiry, tickling the bottom of Anne Marie, enjoying Madame Lestingois, making himself obliviously at home with Edouard Lestingois. He's a natural force that can't be controlled and, for some, barely endured. By the end of the movie it appears, however, that a lottery ticket and the prospect of lustful marriage to Anne Marie may finally tame Boudu. "For once, both modern morals and the laws of nature are satisfied," says a member of the wedding party. Fortunately, a lily floating on the river and a bad sense of balance bring Boudu back the life he had. He may have been saved from drowning at the start of the movie, but he's saved from bourgeois respectability at the end.

This is a marvelously sophisticated and warm comedy. Everybody has their foibles exposed and no one really gets hurt. Michel Simon as Boudu is simply unique. "I watch Boudu often," says Jean Renoir in a filmed introduction to the movie, "not because I revel in contemplation of my past work, but simply because of Michel Simon." Charles Granval as Lestingois is just about as good.

The Criterion DVD presentation is first rate. There are several extras which are interesting and informative, including an interview made 35 years later with Renoir and Simon discussing the movie.

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

"Boudu saved from drowning" known in France as "Boudu sauvé des eaux" is a comedy about a Parisian bookseller who rescues a homeless man from a suicide attempt. He takes him in but his poor manners bother those around him.

The film is directed by Jean Renoir known for many other great classic French films. The film has some great scenes of 1930's Paris and good acting.

The DVD has plenty of extra features also.
There is an old introduction to the film by Jean Renoir, an interactive map of 1930's Paris specializing in the film's locations, a new interview with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, scenes from a program featuring Jean Renoir and Michel Simon, and a video conversation between film director Eric Rohmer and movie critic Jean Douchet

The interactive map feature was very well done and shows how the filming locations appear today.

Overall, this is a very fine movie and I recommend it.

In BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, Renoir's satire is never cruel. He shows affection for all of his silly characters, and no one escapes a ribbing.

Boudu is pure id (imagine Walt Whitman on a three-day bender), but he has no real malice toward anyone. Lestingois, the good citizen who takes him in, is driven by a sincere but utterly self-serving sense of compassion. He thinks he can bring this wild animal into his house and groom and curry him until he personifies the bookseller's own generosity. And he believes he can do this without any noticeable disruption in his own carefully ordered universe. Result: Boudu dutifully applies black polish to his shoes, then wipes off the excess with the aid of a white bedspread. At every turn, china shop meets bull. It's lovely.

I've been waiting for the DVD releases of the early 1930s Renoir films. As is standard for Criterion, the print quality of this release is beautiful and the extras are nice, especially the footage of Renoir, and Renoir with Simon, discussing the film. Great DVD release for Renoir and Simon fans; hopefully 'La Chienne' will follow soon.

I'm not into a lot of analysis and social commentary like many of the reviewers of this film seem to be. And I have nothing against the bourgeoisie--average middle class people make the world go round (and I bet that most people who review films on Amazon are very middle-class, enjoying the comforts of 21st century America--which are considerably more than the comforts of 1930's France.) I can see that if there was a real Boudu, I would not want him in my house for very long, if at all (the man spits in books! He uses clean bed quilts to wipe his dirty feet!) However, all social commentary aside, this is one of the funniest movies ever. Michel Simon is a comic genius. The physical things he does, the way he talks just continually crack you up--he would be funny in a moview by himself. But it's even funnier here to watch him react with the other people in the movie, who are all really good actors and excellent straight men (and women). If you just want to laugh and laugh, watch this.

I'm not a fan of comedic cinema (nothing against it as a genre or art form; I just don't have much of a funny bone). But Renoir's "Boudo Saved from Drowning" (or "...from the water" in French) had me laughing at the richness of Michel Simon's portrayal of the crazily unconventonal tramp who disrupts a respectable bourgeois household.

Boudo is a comical Caliban, a wild "Neanderthal" as one of the film's characters calls him, who serves as a countervailing force to everything that the middle class calls "civilization." He eats when he wants, sleeps where he wants, wears what he wants, he has no sense of property or propriety, and feels neither gratitude nor obligation when given a handout. He's very much like an animal: embodied, appetitive, and clueless about what's respectable and what's not.

But Boudu performs an important function in the film: he reveals the pretensions and hypocrisy of so-called respectable middle class. They sneak around in their adulterous affairs. Boudu's lust is open and unconcealed. They sell their souls for money and prestige. Boudu couldn't care less. They mouth platitudes about helping their fellow man, but only if the fellow man they're helping is polite and clean and well-trained. "Boudu Saved from Drowning" is a wonderful expose of the thinness of the veneer we call "social propriety."

Just three hilarious moments from the film:

Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval), the bookseller who saves Boudu from the Seine and then embarks on a crusade to civilize him, washes his hands of his uncooth guest when he discovers that Boudu has spit in a copy of Balzac's The Physiology of Marriage. "I care less than nothing for someone who would desecrate this book!" he exclaims. "One should only come to the aid of one's equals!" Yet Lestingois, who seems so concerned about a book on marriage, has no qualms about cheating on his wife.

A little girl gives street tramp Boudu 5 francs. Several moments later, an obviously wealthy dandy passing by fruitlessly searches his pockets for change to give Boudu. Boudu gives him the 5 franc note, telling him to get himself something to eat. The gesture is absolutely without guile or sarcasm, which is what makes it so hilarious.

Tramp Boudu loses his dog and asks a park cop for help finding him. The cop shoos him away. Moments later a well-dressed society woman comes running up to the same cop complaining that her 10,000 franc dog has disappeared. Immediately a sizeable portion of the Paris constabulary are on the case.

In an interview with Simon and Renois included on the Criterion disk, the two men remember that the film was met with outrage when it was released in 1932, and theaters showing it were even closed down by the Paris authorites. Apparently the film hit exactly the bourgeois nerve at which it was aimed. It still does today.

This is a marveouls slice of film history, giving a very accurate representation of life in 1932 Paris, and also an artistic vision, as well as subthemes of Freudianism, as it began to permate the arts of the 1930s and 1940s.
Boudu is reminiscent of Chaplain's little trap, but more realistic and fully realized, irritating, ignorant, aggrivating and entirely self centered. He is the animal nature of man, and our Bourgeous gentleman who takes him in is the supposedly cultured man who is also selfish and blithe in his own ways.
The two main female characters also represent the "natural" woman as opposed to the "polished" woman. No one here is blameless. This makes for marvelous complexity, if a loss of likability.
There are traveling shots here within the confines of the apartment which are still influential - the delicious film AMELIE has set ups which echo many of the the set ups in this film.
An important film for film history buffs, interesting for history buffs, probably much too predictable and slow for many modern film audiences. It's strength is also it's weakness, the time the Director gives actors time to just "be" within an environment (and the correctly used hamminess of the lead actor).
This was the basis of "Down & Out in Beverly Hills," and translated well. They even managed to keep the tone. See that one if you're not interested in the historical context.
Note how casting has changed. None of these actors are beauties, even the one cast as a beauty. That is so wonderful and refreshing - I wish we'd get back to that instead of everyone looking like a plastic mannequin

After a suicide attempt, a beggar (Michel Simon) is saved from the waters by an antiquarian bestseller. The rest runs for you because the only fact to intend describe it it would break the magic spell.
A tour de force film, in the same line of Rene Clair' s Paris belongs us.
A magisterial masterpiece.

This is the film that "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" is based on.
I Haven't seen this for many years, but recall it as being far better that 'Down and Out' on many levels.