|
|
Feature Film – 108mn
Color
French with English subtitles
Screenplay Jean Renoir
Music Georges Van Parys
Cast Jean Gabin, Françoise Arnoul, María Félix : Lola de Castro, Philippe Clay , Anna Amendola, Jean-Roger Caussimon
Format 35 mm - 1.37:1 - mono
Genre Drama
First ralease December 27, 1954 (Italia) – April 27, 1955 (France)
Restored version 2010
Awards 1956 : Grand Prix de l’Académie du Cinéma
|
|
Synopsis Set in 1890s Paris, Henri Danglard, owner of the fashionable (but bankrupt) cafe Le Paravent Chinois featuring his mistress, belly dancer Lola, goes slumming in Montmartre where the then-old-fashioned cancan is still danced. There, he conceives the idea of reviving the cancan as the feature of a new, more popular establishment, Le Moulin Rouge… and meets Nini, a laundress and natural dancer, whom he hopes to star in his new show. But a tangled maze of jealousies intervenes.
About Jean Renoir made more than forty films, from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. He is one of the most famous and influential French filmmakers, and his pictures La grande illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937) and La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made.
Starring French actor Jean Gabin, one of the greatest stars of European cinema at that time, French Cancan belongs to Jean Renoir’s last period and is his first film to be shot in a French studio after his postwar exile in the USA. As part of his trilogy of Technicolor musical comedies, the film is not only a tribute to the show business and the world of the Moulin Rouge, but essentially a vibrant celebration of life, beauty, art, movements and colors, notably with its magnificent and accelerating 10-minute ending sequence of a performance of the cancan. French Cancan, with its portrait of La Belle Epoque, the glorious
19th century era, can also be seen as a moment when Jean Renoir, at the end of his career, comes closer to the universe of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, leading painter of the Impressionist style.
Selected filmography of Jean Renoir(1894-1979)
1933 – Boudu sauvé des eaux (aka Boudu saved from downing)
1933 – Madame Bovary
1936 – Les bas-fonds (aka The lower depths)
1937 – La grande illusion
1938 – Le bête humaine
1939 – La règle du jeu (aka The rules of the game)
1946 – Le journal d’une femme de chambre (aka The diary of a chambermaid)
1951 – Le fleuve (aka The river)
With the courtesy ofInstitut français
|
