Toni

 When I was 21, a friend at the University of Minnesota took a class about the films of Renoir.  I used to come to the class in which I was not enrolled and sit in the back of the room to watch the movies that were screened.  One of those pictures involved migrant workers and a murder.  I remember that there were sequences in the film that seemed to me almost unbearably direct and unmediated.  It was as if the screen were showing the truth without anything intervening.  I experienced something while watching that film that I find incommunicable -- the feeling of being in the presence of actual reality, as if the screen and the means of projection were to dissolve without residue and leave nothing but raw reality revealed by sound and images.  I have looked for that film for forty-five years but haven't been able to find it -- I think the movie was Renoir's 1935 Toni, a box-office failure when it was released and a picture overshadowed by a string of undisputed masterpieces that Renoir made in late thirties.  This movie can be seen now in a crystal-clear Criterion Blu-Ray and it's this version of the picture that I review in this note.

Toni looks remarkable.  It is shot entirely on location with semi-professional actors and there are, indeed, sequences in the movie that have astringent radiance of the greatest documentaries.  The movie uses natural light and long takes, tracking from point to point in the landscape or across rooms.  Editing is unobtrusive, although there are some overlapping sound effects that are startling.  As the film exists today, it is weirdly disjointed, particularly in its second half.  When the picture failed at the box office in Paris, Renoir and his producer cut the film from 112 minutes to the 88 minute version now extant.  This was probably a catastrophe -- Renoir concedes that he cut out the best scene in the film, an extended shot in which a corpse is wheeled away from a murder scene concealed under laundry while men walking to work joke with the attractive laundress.  Once you know that this scene is missing, you feel the void left in the movie by its absence -- the picture's climax comes too quickly and doesn't make any sense as now presented.  Audiences in 1935 thought the scene, which must have played like Hitchcock, too macabre and were, apparently, disturbed -- critics praised the picture highly.  Unfortunately, the last quarter of the film is now a mess and the movie isn't very good:  it's ending is a cliche although, perhaps, one that Toni invented, but it is annoying nonetheless to see the film collapse into a heap of commonplaces and stereotypes in its final reel.

Probably as timely now as it was when first made, Toni begins with a group of immigrant workers disembarking from a train in Martigues, a small industrial city 45 miles from Marseilles.  The industry in the town is never really established although we see in the background of some shots a complex of factories and a big smokestack.  The protagonists of the film don't work, however,in factories -- they seem to be agricultural laborers and employees of a big quarry that periodically dynamites the hillside creating dangerous avalanches of pale rock.  It isn't clear what the quarry is making -- is it aggregate? or building stones? and some aspects of the film are quite obscure, even obtuse.  Before the workers disembark, we see some laborers on a huge railroad trestle (that turns out to be integral to the action) grousing about the new arrivals "taking food of (their) mouths" -- but it turns out that these laborers are also immigrants to the south of France having arrived only three years earlier.  (The Great War killed so many French men that workers have to be imported to labor in the vineyards and factories.) Toni, an Italian immigrant, finds lodging at a boarding house in town -- we see the owner of the place, Marie, reluctantly letting him stay there.  In the next shot, Toni is in bed with Marie and has been living with her for a year.  In fact, the narrative has boldly omitted their courtship and the development of their relationship -- this is one of those male-female bonds that is both profound and deadly:  Maris and Toni don't get along, but she can't live without him, and they fight perpetually and violently.  Toni is in love with Josefa, a beautiful Spanish woman, who works as a laundress.  Josefa seduces Toni in a erotic scene involving a sting to her back by a wasp -- Toni removes the stinger and sucks the venom from the wound.  But Josefa is fickle and she ends up marrying the foreman at the quarry, a nasty baby-faced lout from Paris named Albert.  Albert is a bully and he carries a revolver in his belt.  Out of desperation, Toni marries Marie but they remain desperately unhappy.  When Toni begins to court the unhappy Josefa again, Marie throws him out and, after a final bitter quarrel, tries to drown herself.  (The scenes involving the failed suicide attempt are incredibly powerful and exquisitely filmed -- I think what I recall from the movie is the image of Toni standing forlorn in the water of a big Mediterranean lagoon as men in a rowboat bring the unconscious Marie back to the stony beach.  This sequence has a palpable and unmediated force.)  Toni joins a group of charcoal burners living rough on the top of a bluff overlooking the sea.  Josefa, who now has a two-year old child with Albert, schemes to leave her husband.  She has taken a lover, Gabi, a man who owns a vineyard and is apparently Albert's cousin.  When Albert, who is partners in the vineyard with Gabi, cheats his cousin out of the proceeds of the crop, Josefa plans to steal the money from him and flee with her lover to South America.  (Josefa is a bad judge of men -- Gabi is just about as awful as her husband, Albert.)  Albert catches wind of the plot, beats Josefa with his belt, but, then, negligently drops his pistol.  Josefa picks up the gun and kills her abusive husband,  Gabi shows up, doesn't like the situation, and takes all the money, which he claims to be the fruit of his labors, and flees, leaving Josefa with the corpse.  Toni appears and finds the dead man on the floor.  He tells Josefa to put the dead body on her laundry cart under soiled linen and push the corpse into the woods where he will arrange Albert's cadaver to make it seem that he has killed himself.  While in the course of this activity, squeezing the gun into Albert's dead hand, a local gendarme appears and arrests Toni.  However, Toni makes his escape and flees, ultimately running to his death across the huge railway trestle that featured in the opening shots.  Josefa doesn't want Toni to be convicted of the killing she has committed and so she surrenders to the authorities to save Toni.  But it's to no avail.  A local landowner with a shotgun kills Toni just as he finishes his mad dash across the railroad trestle.  As he dies, we see train pull into the station below disgorging yet another swarm of migrant laborers.  Earlier in the film, Renoir presents the movie's politics, which are mostly concealed by the story:  a worker is asked where he comes from and says,:  "Wherever I work is my home.  Workers have no nation but their work."

The film isn't very good.  The ending in the present (and only) cut is botched.  Although the movie has luxuriated in brilliantly evocative natural lighting, the climactic murder scenes in Josefa and Albert's home are shot in glaring white light -- it's not clear where this light is coming from, particularly since the outside is gloomy with early morning shadows and mist.  The gendarme who shows up without motivation (in the present version) is almost comically a deus ex machina. The ending with another group of immigrants coming to replace the first is so predictable that it is irritating. Marie, who is one of the most interesting characters in the film, simply drops out of the movie when she expels Toni from her home -- she might as well have drowned for all her impact on the last third of the picture from which is almost entirely absent.  The level of incompetence in casting is really staggering:  Toni looks just like Gabi and is very similar in appearance to Albert -- the only way I could tell the characters apart was on the basis of their hats:  Albert wears a fedora, Gabi has a dark beret, while Toni has a checkered beret.  Even worse, Josefa and Marie are carbon copies of one another -- we simply can't tell them apart except by context.  Probably, the characters are readily distinguishable if your speak and understand French:  Albert is Parisian, Gabi is from the south of France, and Toni is an Italian; similarly, Marie is French and Josefa is from Spain.  I assume the characters were all given distinctive accents and that this would help the viewer tell them apart.  But if you are reading subtitles, the film is extremely confusing.  The locations are brilliant and several of the scenes are very memorable but the movie isn't successful in itself.  Film historians note that the picture shot on location with a semi-professional cast is a precursor to Italian neo-realism -- this is undoubted true, but doesn't redeem to film in itself.