A welcome revival for Jean Renoir's superb urban pastoral comedy from 1932, which proves the adage that no good deed goes unpunished. By Peter Bradshaw
Jean Renoir's urban pastoral comedy from 1932 was last revived in UK cinemas just five years ago, as part of a director's retrospective. Well, it's good to see it again. Charles Granval plays Lestingois, a well-to-do Parisian bookseller, who in a mood of high-spirited goodwill ? brought on by the agreeable affair he is having with his housemaid ? impulsively dives into the Seine to rescue a drowning tramp, and invites him to stay in the family home. The object of this instantly and intensely regretted act of kindness is Boudu (Michel Simon): smelly, bearded, ungrateful. He repays Lestingois's charity by lustfully pursuing his wife and his maid. The movie dramatises the old adage about no good deed going unpunished, or perhaps it demonstrates how inscrutable fate may find a way to punish a wrongdoer through his one, atypical, altruistic act. The anarchic Boudu sweeps through this bourgeois home, upsetting and exposing all its complacent arrangements and concealments. There is a startling contrast between the drawing-room comedy of the interior scenes and Renoir's superbly dynamic documentary-style realism in the Paris streets outside: crowded, bustling, cosmopolitan. Almost 80 years on, it still has a superb energy.
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