Buy Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection here, one of many top quality Class Differences Comedies products at DVD Dispatcher. We greatly appreciate your patronage at DVD Dispatcher and look forward to offering you great products and prices in the future.
Current Page: Home : Comedy DVD Movies : Class Differences Comedies : Item 19 of 129
|
|
Features
Actors: Michel Simon, Marcelle Hainia, Sévérine Lerczinska, Jean Gehret, Max Dalban
Directors: Jean Renoir
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 1
Rating: 
Studio: Criterion
DVD Release Date: August 23, 2005
Run Time: 84 minutes
Average Customer Review:
  (11 customer reviews)
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Boudu Saved from Drowning (VHS Tape)
The opening scenes of 'Boudu Saved from drowning' contrast the urbane bookseller Lestingois with the hirsute titular tramp. The former presides over a haven of super-civilisation on the banks of the Seine, surrounded by rare books, paintings, statues, the best that the best minds have thought and created. he is using the skill absorbed from this culture, however, to beguile his impressionable mistress, the young maid Anne-Marie - in this case classical rhetoric not only disguising basic natural urges, but actually replacing them, Lestingois' appetite more evident that his capabilities. Boudu, on the other hand, is first seen in a park, caressing his dog, singing snatches of song, linked to the natural and populist. These two collide when Lestingois rescues a suicidal Boudu, and invites him into his home, where he is soon smashing plates, smearing shoe polish over the satin and spiiting in rare Balzac novels. The movement of the film seems to be towards the greater bourgeoisification of Boudu - new clothes, Samsonian hair cut, ennobling by money and marriage. But the film actually revolves around sex. The film starts with a Greek tableau of Pan chasing a nymph, cut to Lestingois and Anne-Marie. Boudu begins replacing his benefactor, not by accumulating bourgeois habits, but by displaying the sexual prowess the self-styled Priapus Lestingois lacks (the latter has no children). 70 years on, 'Boudu' remains a shockingly funny comedy, provocatively hostile to the soul-stultifying deceptions, compromises and resignations of the bourgoisie. If this makes the film sound aridly polemical, than you don't know Renoir - the slouchy, amused Lestingois is the most sympathetic character in the movie, cultured, tolerant, benevolent - his crime, if you like, it the bourgeois expectation that the rescued Boudu should be grateful and hence dependent. Even the women reveal depths beyond the initial caricatures - Mme Lestingois is given a beautiful epiphany, lying dejected on her bed, suddenly awoken by street music, taken back somewhere we've no access to. Concepts of death and rebirth, heaven and hell, destruction and continuity recur, filtered through the overarching metaphor of the river. The film is a strange mixture of the antique and the modern. The documentary-like aspects of the film, the real-location shooting of pre-war Paris, its parks, cafes, pageants, music, rivers, boats etc., are ironically the most 'dated', in the sense that they capture a world long since vanished. The theatrical artificality of the film, by contrast, is the clue to its modernity - the division of the narrative into music-signalled acts; the farce-like plot; the complex composition of domestic and exterior space. The film's motifs revolve around spectators looking at unfolding dramas, windows framing action and dividing characters from life. There is a remarkable sequence in the park, where a plein-air location is turned into a vast, endless stage set, through which characters wander in and out. Far from restricting the cinematic quality of the film, this theatricality liberates it, opening up the rigidity of the frame, of one viewpoint, intimating whole worlds beyond it. These tensions - between civilisation and nature, high and popular culture, sympathy and satire, ancient and modern, documentary and theatre - result in one of Renoir's, and cinema's, greatest films.
Comment | Permalink |
function showYesNoCommunityResponse(uId,result,value) {
var msgLayer = getElement("thanks" + uId);
if ( result == "SUCCESS" ) {
msgLayer.innerHTML = "Thanks for the valuable feedback you provided to other Amazon.com readers and reviewers. Your vote will be counted and will appear on the product page within 24 hours.";
} else {
showVoteErrorResponse(msgLayer,result,value);
}
}
(Report this)
|
|
Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection
List Price: $29.95
Available from Amazon
Price: $26.99
Updated on 11-28-2008.
|
dvddispatcher.com offers top quality Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection in association with leading DVD movie retail stores such as Amazon.com. DVD Dispatcher features hot deals on Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection.
![]()
|
|
Increase your websites importance by offering your visitors one-click consumer reviews and purchase reviews for "Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection" and similar Products from DVD Dispatcher. Just copy and paste the code into your page and add on-topic value to your site.
Provide a link to this product on your website:
Your Code will look like this:
Read reviews and get product information on Boudu Saved from Drowning - Criterion Collection
|
|
|
|
See all 11 customer reviews...