French Cancan

“French Cancan” marks Jean Renoir's return to France after spending the war years in American exile and going on to shoot “The River” in India. With Jean Gabin, the star of his classics “Grand Illusion” and “La Bête humaine”, he also reunites with an old companion. Paris, Montmartre, the late 19th century: after going bankrupt, the impresario Henri Danglard (Gabin) is penniless but full of plans. In the young laundress Nini (Françoise Arnoul) he discovers a dancer with whom he intends to revive the cancan, long out of fashion. The founding of his new venue, the Moulin Rouge, is surrounded by jealousy, intrigue and romantic entanglements. In the end Nini comes to realise that her place is on the stage, and the film culminates in one of the most famous dance sequences in cinema history. Together with “The Golden Coach” and “Elena and Her Men”, the film forms Renoir's trilogy on theatre and performance, in which the stage becomes a symbol of life itself. Its radiant colours recall Impressionist painting, above all the work of his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre. While the critics of “Cahiers du cinéma” accused the established French cinema of the 1950s of stagnation, Truffaut, Rivette and their fellow critics revered Renoir as a role model. “French Cancan” thus became a bridge between the cinema of the 1930s and the emerging French New Wave.