Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Director: Jean Renoir
Writer: Pierre Lestringuez
Stars: Catherine Hessling, Pierre Philippe, Maurice Touzé and Harold Levingston

Index: That's a Wrap!

1925 was the gift that kept on giving when it came to new directors. February saw Josef von Sternberg debut with The Salvation Hunters and René Clair follow him just one week later with The Crazy Ray. March means the debut of Jean Renoir, whose The Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game are often described as the greatest films ever made. If that wasn’t enough, April would introduce Sergei Eisenstein with Strike.

Whirlpool of Fate is a routine melodrama but there are moments to suggest that Renoir had what it took to become notable as a filmmaker the way his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had became notable as a painter. To be fair, he had co-directed a feature with Albert Dieudonné a year earlier, Catherine, but that wasn’t released until 1927. This second film was seen first and he directed it on his own.

One of those moments arrives at the start of the film, just after we’re introduced to Gudule, the young lady at its heart. She’s on horseback to lead the family barge forward. Her brute of an uncle, Jeff, walks backwards on the barge as it passes the camera at exactly the same speed, making it appear as if he’s making no progress at all. It’s not a particularly difficult shot but it shows how the young Renoir had a keen eye.

He also had a keen subject, because Gudule is played by Catherine Hessling, Renoir’s wife and his father’s final model. Hessling had also been the lead in Catherine and would be again in Nana the following year. As Gudule, she’s an anchor to the film, which follows her bad luck in life rather than any particular plot.

She’s not doing too poorly as we begin, with a carefree life on the canal, cooking stew from whatever meat can be found. Her father’s not a bad sort, but after he falls into the canal and drowns, Uncle Jeff takes over and drinks what little inheritance there is. Suddenly the barge will have to be sold and, with a neat zoom into widescreen eyes, courtesy of a letterbox mask on the camera, he attacks her with rape in his mind. She escapes with her dog, runs into the night and the film follows her.

The second act begins when she passes by a tree with a poacher in it. He’s La Fouine, or the Weasel, and he seems to live with an old gypsy lady called the Bat in a caravan, so Gudule gets to live there too while he trains her up in the art of his trade. It’s not an idyllic life but it’s an agreeable step up from Uncle Jeff.

Unfortunately, her dog runs across a road in front of a rich farmer, Justin Crépoix, ruining his bicycle, and that sparks a feud. The Weasel steals his cabbages, so Crépoix destroys all his fishing gear, so the Weasel fires his haystack, and, by this point, all that’s left for Crépoix to do is assemble a drunken mob and burn down the Bat’s caravan.

So, she runs again, this time without a dog, given that it’s with the Weasel, wherever he is, and promptly falls down a cliff into a quarry and is shocked into losing her senses. Renoir, or whoever edited the film, uses fast cuts here to create an effective impressionistic effect of madness, these traumas joining forces to make her want to give up and hide.

So to the third act, which Renoir fortunately foreshadows with happiness. At some point, a connection will manifest to link Gudule with a young gentleman named Georges Raynal, who has floated around the periphery of some of the early scenes. Did he actually take a photo of Gudule as her barge passed him?

We know they’ll connect because the script, written by a Renoir family friend called Pierre Lestringuez, isn’t ever surprising. Frankly, he does a much better job, as Pierre Philippe, of bringing brutish life to Uncle Jeff, a character we truly love to hate. If only I’d stolen one of Justin Crépoix’s cabbages, I could have thrown it at the screen. Uncle Jeff warrants that.

While Lestringuez wrote the story, it’s not a million miles away from what they wrote for Catherine a year earlier. Renoir’s approach is to start his wife off quite a way down the societal structure, hurl misfortune after misfortune at her until she almost dies, then kiss it all better with a happy romantic ending.

The slide into the quarry doesn’t kill her but does shatter her memory. Georges leaves food for her instead of helping more substantially, but after a ferocious storm kicks up, he goes to find her and bring her home.

Unfortunately for her but fortunately for us, he doesn’t find her until the next morning. In the meantime, the storm and her fever sends her into weird hallucinatory nightmares that give Renoir opportunity to shine. If this film is remembered for anything other than being his debut, it’s appropriately this sequence.

And it’s quite the sequence! Some of it we’re not surprised to see, like slow motion running and ghostlike floating. I’m rather fond of one shot where Gudule stands next to a tree while someone else floats in front of it, as if they’re a hanged effigy. There’s some neat gravity play as well, ascending and descending.

The part that I really wasn’t expecting was how Renoir doesn’t just use double exposures, but rotates his camera and overlays seamlessly to impeccable effect. There’s a shot of Gudule standing in a corridor of vertical columns, but Uncle Jeff and Justin Crépoix hurdle them and her going horizontally down the side. I’m used to seeing this sort of thing in horror movies as demons show us they can ignore gravity.

Ironically, while Renoir does a fantastic job of taking Gudule’s mind away from reality for this sequence, he doesn’t find as much success grounding the rest of the film in grim reality.

We can totally buy into French country life because he shot it in the French countryside, at La Nicotiere, the estate of Paul Cezanne, the painter, who was a family friend. Scenes in the fields and on the canal are particularly strong, telling us that time works at a different speed out there in the countryside.

However, Catherine Hessling never seems to quite fit. I realise that Renoir’s goal was always to make her stand out and she is a fish out of water for much of the movie, but that should come from her performance not her eyeliner. I could never buy into the depths of her misery while her lipstick, eyebrows and mascara were always perfect. Of course, he was making her a star rather than an actor and Gloria Swanson would have done it this way, so that’s that.

Ironically, while he persevered for a while, Hessling never became a star. They separated in 1930 and divorced in 1943, by which point it was Renoir who had become famous, director of classics. This was just the beginning.