Kritiken

As the film progresses Maurice reveals depths of insecurity beyond even Dédé, a man who slaps Lulu around out of boredom. But the wonder of the film is that it never sits in judgment; even the most heinous actions occur due to the convergence of personality and circumstance, and Renoir's camera keeps its distance, peeking through curtains or café windows. This framing is remote, almost aloof.

Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel and Hitchcock's Blackmail are visible in the framework, McCarey has the sloshed homecoming in Ruggles of Red Gap, Pabst dissolves are prevalent. Simon in rags for the ferocious epilogue prepares Boudu, along with the ineffable line between degradation and freedom: Life's a bitch and life's beautiful, and art for Renoir must be more than one thing at once.

With "La Chienne," Renoir invented a new sort of plein-air cinema, pioneering a fluid naturalism predicated on his ability to shoot sound on location without sacrificing the freedom to move his camera... The Film is at once less harsh and more devastating than Fritz Lang's noirish Hollywood remake "Scarlet Street" (1945). In his juxtaposition of art and life, Renoir contrives an ending, bitter yet affirmative, that combines irony, pathos and self-reflection in one transcendent image.

Notwithstanding the technical difficulties, Renoir had clearly mastered the new medium of sound cinema. La chienne's vision of Paris, with street cinematography that prefigures the noir vision of poetic realism and the deep exploration of interior space that would become the filmmaker's trademark, is enhanced by a complexly layered and unusually realistic use of sound.

The cramped stage [of the opening] establishes a metaphorical framework for Renoir's subsequent blocking and, particularly, for the density of the film's myriad art-within-art resonances, while the puppets' claims of the narrative's amorality are cheeky and misleading. For La Chienne, the lack of morality is the morality. Renoir's refusal to judge his characters is humanistic, but more importantly, it signifies an aesthetic philosophy that denies the audience facilely objective bearings.

Renoir films the story with flashes of spontaneous lyrical imagination, including... a scene of shocking revelation done with the wry distance of a carefully choreographed shot through a window, and a sequence of violence that's filmed with a rare poetic delicacy that has nothing to do with fetishizing or aestheticizing that violence but, rather, quietly extracts from its horrors a prismatic range of the chaotically tangled and overstoked emotions that flow into and from it.

In terms of Renoir's career, La Chienne has long been seen as a rebirth, after his undervalued, often remarkable but erratic silent period. It was the first of a string of masterpieces that fused documentary realism and theatrical artifice, comedy and tragedy, political engagement and classical theme, visual bravura and experiment with sound to produce the greatest single body of work in the cinema.

For Renoir, this style demanded full use of the sounds, spaces, and personalities discovered during filming--in a word, falling in love with the world around him. This rush of emotion yielded significant technical breakthroughs: LA CHIENNE was among the first movies to record sound during shooting rather than in post-production; and the canny framing marked some of the first exercises in what would come to be known as deep-focus photography.

From the jocular, argumentative, and dichotomous Punch and Judy puppetry prologue that alternately introduces the film as a serious social drama, a comedy of manners, and a slice-of-life observation, La Chienne captures the moral ambiguity and underlying inequity of culturally entrenched social customs and rationalized human cruelty.

Jean Renoir's first sound feature (1931) and one of his best... This was later remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street, a powerful film that nevertheless can't hold a candle to the original.