“Renoir has never attacked the bourgeois ethos of profit…with more rigorous logic than he has in this film….It is no coincidence that some of Opale’s expressions and gesticulations remind one of Boudu.”-Jean Douchet “I wanted to tell a story about rich people….People like Cordelier are bored, and I believe that the only way to cure oneself of this illness is to address spiritual questions.”-Renoir In Renoir’s modern-day version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jean-Louis Barrault gives a portrait of untortured evil-as Opale (the film’s Mr. Hyde), he becomes our favorite character in the film, so vicious, yet so witty and mischievous. This metamorphosis from the icy Cordelier, who seeks to prove the existence of the soul in material terms, is hardly a matter of make-up. His presence lends a bizarre air of menace to the streets of Paris, where the exteriors were shot. The Testament of Dr. Cordelier was a fascinating experiment in which Renoir adapted theatrical techniques (including long rehearsals) to those of television-direct recording, multiple cameras, long takes. The result, as Raymond Durgnat writes, “made at the same time as Godard’s and Truffaut’s first features, parallels many nouvelle vague characteristics before they had fully developed. At 65 Renoir had become a contemporary of his grandchildren’s generation.” —BAM/PFA
The son of the painter Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir became one of France’s most important and respected filmmakers during the middle of the 20th century. A Philosophy and Math student, Renoir became a cavalryman, but was invalided out of the army before World War I. Later, he married a model and aspiring actress, and, following the death of his father and the acquisition of an inheritance, set up his own production company to produce movies for his wife. Renoir learned from these early experiences of financing movies and watching other films, and became a director in 1924. With the advent of sound, Renoir’s career was quickly made with a series of profitable films, including La Chienne (1931), a savage and dark drama about a man’s self-destruction, which was later remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street. Renoir’s subsequent films, including The Lower Depths (1936) and Grand Illusion (1937), were among the finest made in France before the war, and were well acknowledged at the time of… read more
Opale in Jean Renoir's Le testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959); featuring (shhh!) Jean-Louis Barrault; cinematography by Georges Leclerc
Below: Jean-Louis Barrault in Jean Renoir's Le testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959); cinematography by Georges Leclerc. Below: Denis Lavant
