None of this is to suggest that Renoir was unsympathetic to the torturous reality that provoked the revolution in the first place. However, his innate need to understand his fellow creatures and his craving for authenticity led him far afield from the original intent of his financial backers, the French left-wing Popular Front. Abel Gance (whose work we will begin to consider next week) could glorify Napoleon; Sergei Eisenstein did the same for his Bolshevik masters; Leni Riefenstahl…’nuff said, I think you get the point. Renoir was not apolitical, and politics kept pursuing him through two world wars, but his vision of reality was more transcendent and complicated than these other directors’, or almost anybody’s.

With hardly any religious content in his films, he could still be viewed as the most spiritual of filmmakers. With minimal flesh showing and with no memorable double entendres outside perhaps of Boudu Saved from Drowning, Renoir was also the most sensual of filmmakers. As I get older, it becomes harder to view humanity as something other than a failed experiment, harder to accept humanity—as Renoir does—on its own terms. Peter Bogdanovich sees him as some kind of secular saint. Biographer Pierre Leprohon suggests that in La Marseillaise, Renoir carried his “good intentions” and “gentleness” too far. I am reminded of a touching scene late in Renoir’s splendid novel The Notebooks of Captain Georges. The title character, a devoted heterosexual (the whole book is about his affair with Agnes, a young prostitute), is travelling on a train with a Russian prince. He awakes from a nap to find the prince holding Georges’s hand while masturbating. The prince makes a perfunctory apology, telling Georges that he finds him attractive and thanks him for the service he has unwittingly rendered. Renoir writes, “He told me all this in that charming Russian accent which made even the most outrageous utterance acceptable. It was the only happening of its kind during the journey.”