Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)
Directed by Jean Renoir
Michel Simon gives one of the most memorable performances in screen history as Boudu, a Parisian tramp who takes a suicidal plunge into the Seine and is rescued by a well-to-do bookseller, Edouard Lestingois. The Lestingois family decides to take in the irrepressible bum, and he shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations. With Boudu Saved from Drowning, legendary director Jean Renoir takes advantage of a host of Parisian locations and the anarchic charms of his lead actor to create an effervescent satire of the bourgeoisie.
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What critics compared Boudu Saved from Drowning to
Robert and Max Eggers’ script wields some well-researched period dialogue, although the success of some over-the-top tendencies depends on the key delivery of Dafoe, who is allotted a number of phenomenal monologues paired with gnarly close-ups of a visage which recalls Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932).
It’s not a comedy of social upheaval, like “Boudu Saved from Drowning” (1932), though it does have wit to spare.
There is a tradition of films about transgressive outsiders transforming the households into which they are invited, from Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning in 1932 to its 1986 remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, by way of Pasolini’s Theorem (1968).
The basic plot formula—a shaggy-dog outsider lets some air into a stale bourgeois life—is a familiar staple from Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) to Paul Mazursky’s yuppie Los Angelino remake Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), though the film that I thought of most during Ade’s was the (significantly funnier) 2012 Adam Sandler vehicle That’s My Boy.
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Benedict Cumberbatch, donning a Boudu Saved From Drowning beard…
Dassin scouted locations for the picture by taking long walks with his secretary, and as a result Rififi joins Boudu Saved from Drowning , Les Bonnes Femmes , and Breathless as one of the great street-level views of Parisian life.