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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Save the last dance for Renoir., April 22, 2002
Jean Renoir turns the crises leading up to the civilisation-shaking devastation of World War One into the stuff of Ruritarian operetta, a world in which mislaid hot-air balloons cause international incidents. You half expect Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy to pop up in this Faberge farce, with its bright confectionary colours, dazzling uniforms, theatrical interiors, quaint crowd scenes and intricate musical seqeunces. Elena (Ingrid Bergman) is a Polish princess living in impoverished French exile, set up by her pander-Baroness mother in various, potentially lucrative relationships, the latest with a bumptious shoe manufacturer. On Bastille Day, a military parade is orchestrated to showcase the dashing and popular General Rollan (Cocteau's altar ego Jean Marais), who is being used by right-wing interests, including the shoe magnate, to stage a coup in increasingly troubled times. Having left a composer-lover, and indifferently engaged to M. Shoe, Elena meets the Count de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer) at the parade, who introduces her to his friend, the General. The latter's chorus of counsellors, straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan, note the army man is instantly smitten, and decide to use Elena to further their dastardly plans, a project her fiance wholeheartedly encourages (hoping to force some tax-breaks). The Count, whose idleness Elena disdains, himself yearns for the Princess.It is tempting to sit back and enjoy Renoir the amiable magician weave his choreographic skills, revelling in the artifice of his post-war Technicolour phase. Each scene begins unpromisingly with the utmost theatricality - indoors, dialogue-driven, with the emphasis on costume and decor - and is imperceptibly opened out, until the miraculous flow of wit and life, gently encouraged by concealed but controlled style, rushes through the screen. From the rigidity of the tableau, different levels of activity interweave, spiral, crash; the main focus of the plot can be intruded on by one of the myriad sub-plots. Just as political drive and erotic machinations are tautologous, so the various social hierarchies - aristocracy, military officers, nouveau riche, politicians, businessmen, servants, workers, soldiers, the 'mob' - are collapsed in glorious comic chaos [Renoir is one of the few directors who loves the spirit of public gatherings]. 'Elena' has often been called a colour reworking of Renoir's masterpiece, 'The Rules Of The Game' - it has the same country-house, upstairs/downstairs set-up, the same flexibility of cinematic space, even a shared actor; but it doesn't have that film's tragic urgency, or its sense of a world passing away we attribute to it; 'Elena', indeed, seems bouyantly content. For all its contrivances, though, the film rings poetically true - it catches the hysteria of a world dancing into the abyss - but it's not sorry, even if some of the passengers might be worth saving. Before we accuse Renoir of complacency, however, we should note Roger Ebert's reminder that 'Elena' was made at a time when General de Gaulle was being lured out of retirement. With its shady right-wing mandarins, egotistical coups and disruptive public sphere, 'Elena' seems oddly prophetic.
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