After the death of her father, a barge man, Virginie has no one but her cruel uncle Jef. But he merely squanders his inheritance and sells the barge, before attempting to rape his niece. Virginie flees into the countryside where she is befriended by a young poacher, ‘the Ferret’, who teaches her his trade. They get into a feud with an unpleasant farmer, Justin, which leads them to burn his haystack. In revenge, Justin coaxes his friends into driving the poacher and his mother from the area. Alone again, Virginie stumbles into a quarry and falls deliriously ill. Georges Raynal, the son of an eccentric landowner, finds her and takes her to a farmer’s cottage where she can be cared for. Virginie’s new found happiness is short-lived, however, as uncle Jef appears and demands money from her...
Jean Renoir’s first full length film, La Fille de l’eau, is an improbable yet compelling melange of melodrama, neo-realism, farce and surrealism. Although the film oscillates from one extreme to the other, between high drama and light comedy, between naturalistic and highly stylised photography, it manages to captivate its audience with its typically Renoir-esque blend of romantic charm and raw humanity.
The film features Renoir’s young wife Catherine Hessling, in the part of the orphan girl Virginie. She was his father’s last model and Jean Renoir is evidently equally besotted with her, casting her as a classical heroine in a countryside idyll which could equally have been the subject of his father. The script was written by Renoir’s close friend, Pierre Lestringuez (who also appears in the film in the role of Jef), inspired by American serials, French melodrama and traditional fairy tales. Admittedly, the narrative is simplistic, even nonsensical, but Renoir’s treatment of it is surprisingly mature and he manages to create a work of immense beauty and originality.
Renoir was clearly influenced by the avant-garde of the silent film era, particularly Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, adopting and modifying some of their experimental cinematic techniques. This is noticeable in Renoir’s masterful use of rapid montage (showing a series of camera shots of separate actions in rapid succession), creating an impression of naked brutality and blind panic. This is used to great effect in the harrowing scene where Jef attempts to rape Virginie and, later, when Justin and his entourage set fire to the gypsy caravan.
Perhaps the most noteworthy sequence in La Fille de l’eau is the remarkable dream sequence where, in a state of delirium, Virginie imagines an extreme fantasy version of her real-life experiences in the film. Using techniques such a reverse slow motion photography, superposition of images, dissolves and slow-motion tracking shots, the sequence is both mesmerising and awe-inspiring, combining surrealism and children’s fantasy. This is certainly one of the most extraordinary set of images to be seen in early French cinema.
La Fille de l’eau is not Jean Renoir’s greatest film – the plot is too fanciful to be taken seriously and the film generally lacks the maturity and restraint of Renoir’s later years. Nevertheless, it deserves to be considered as a major cinematic achievement for a young director who was still undecided as to whether he was cut out for a film-making career.
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