The film that marked the return of Jean Renoir to French studios, sixteen years after The Rules of the Game (1939), is about the world of entertainment, like The Golden Coach, with an almost seamless connection between the stage and behind-the-scenes. Inspired by the life of Ziegler, the founder of the Moulin Rouge, French Cancan began as a Franco London Film commission, which Renoir adapted in complete freedom (“the story proposed has, in this case, no relationship with the film”) to re-create the world of the Belle Époque, the Butte Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge, that is, the era and the places of his childhood. He tracked down the protagonist of Grand Illusion, Jean Gabin, and gave him the role of the sly and seductive impresario who revives the cancan and opens the Moulin Rouge, dividing himself between his mistress, Belle Abbesse (Maria Felix) and a new talent, the young laundress Nini (Françoise Arnoul). The film tells a parallel story of initiation into the world of entertainment (and sex) and incipient but jolly old age that confront one another in a popular, vivid and vivacious world. As usual in works by the filmmaker of La Chienne, sensuality is a dominant color, “that mixture of rhythm and sweat that Renoir knew how to evoke powerfully” (Chabrol), sublimated in the cancan sequences that capture “the poetic yet earthy quality of that type of dance: its physical side, the tiring start, the rough, near brutal athletic movements together with its extraordinary momentum” (Renoir). French Cancan, as Truffaut wrote, “marks an important date in the history of color films. Jean Renoir did not want to make a merely pictorial film and so French Cancan is an anti- Moulin Rouge (1953) film. In the latter, John Huston mixed colors by the use of gelatine filters. In Renoir’s film there are only pure colors. Each shot in French Cancan is a popular poster, a moving ‘Epinal image’ with beautiful blacks, maroons and beiges!”. The colors were the result of a specific choice, as set designer Max Douy noted, “The color was supposed to be over the top. The historical reality of it was simplified: the Moulin Rouge is all light and dark pink while in reality it was actually much more colorful.”
Roberto Chiesi