Birth of an Auteur: Jean Renoir’s Whirlpool of Fate and Nana on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

These features are revealing snapshots of an artist of uncommon ambition and vision from the outset of his career.

Whirlpool of Fate

Even though the 1925 silent drama Whirlpool of Fate was Jean Renoir’s first feature, it displays many of the director’s trademarks. His interest in the collisions of class strata is evident from the opening moments as a poor barge captain and his daughter, Gudule (Catherine Hessling, Renoir’s wife at the time), slowly make their way down the Loing River, a tributary of the Seine, and the pampered scions of a local landlord ride along the banks on horseback. The gargantuan, unwieldy barge makes for a number of amusing visual gags, but the comedy turns sour when Gudule’s father is knocked into the water and drowns.

That jarring oscillation between whimsy and severity is sustained for the remainder of the film, which follows Gudule as she’s taken in by an uncle (Pierre Lestringuez) and subsequently flees his abusive clutches and has alternately romantic and off-putting dalliances with a series of young men, rich and poor alike. Apropos its title, Whirlpool of Fate can get convoluted, eventually involving an act of arson and mob vengeance, and Renoir employs a stylistic abandon to match the freewheeling narrative. He runs through a gauntlet of techniques from the silent era, from jolting close-ups on expressionistically made-up faces to dreamy superimpositions to dynamic shifts in lighting that can turn a relatively naturalistic scene into a theatrically stylized nightmare in an instant. One dream sequence even makes use of slow motion, time reversal, and other tricks that anticipate Jean Cocteau’s cinema of the oneiric.

Whirlpool of Fate is the work of a filmmaker struggling to balance his various ambitions. But however compulsive, Renoir’s technique is sophisticated, and it’s fascinating to see the seeds of his future work in this film’s dense composition. Renoir famously said, “A director makes only one movie in his life, then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again,” and you can see how, say, the impressionistic idylls in Fontainebleau forests prefigure the effervescent A Day in the Country, or how the bleak, nighttime face of the film anticipates the proto-noir Night at the Crossroads. And if Whirlpool of Fate reveals a director prone to losing control of his characters, then that’s a lack he certainly corrected by the time of The Rules of the Game.

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Nana, Renoir’s 1926 adaptation of the Émile Zola novel about a woman whose hypnotic effect on men leads many to ruin, is governed by a more ironclad command of form. In particular, Renoir shows a much sturdier handle on how to juggle a large cast, while his elliptical approach to editing generously puts us in the position of needing to suss out the connections between the characters. Though not a showcase for deep-focus photography like Renoir’s later work, the film nonetheless makes great use out of its backgrounds to illuminate human characteristics. Look for the cracks in the classical pillars in the palatial manor of the Count and Countess Muffat (Werner Krauss and Jacqueline Forzane) that hints at the schism that the husband’s eventual infatuation with Nana (Hessling) will cause, or how Nana is always surrounded by backstage clutter that comes to resemble spoils of her sexual conquests.

Admittedly, the film struggles mightily due to the miscalculation of Hessling’s performance, which isn’t up to the task of convincingly capturing Nana’s unrepentant, hard-knocks outlook on life and her ferocious consumption and dismissal of the men she comes into contact with; Hessling too often looks childish, crossing her arms and furrowing her brow poutingly to connote her character’s malice. And though Renoir was an obvious admirer of Zola (he would go on to adapt the La Bête Humaine), his own ambivalent moral judgment clashes with the author’s more brutal sense of absolution for both Nana and her transfixed marks.

Still, Renoir sharply conveys the way in which Zola implicates the men who allow themselves to fall for Nana as a group of inveterate social climbers in competition with each other even as he also finds an empathetic lens through which to view a woman whose ruthlessness is borne of both an impoverished childhood and a lifetime of mutual exploitation with richer men. Renoir’s unpredictable, human streak comes to the fore near the end when Nana goes to a ball in full regalia, only to lapse into vulgar behavior, drinking bawdily and looking truly overjoyed and completely herself for perhaps the only time in the entirety of the film.

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Both Whirlpool of Fate and Nana are now available for the first time on Region 1 Blu-ray. Kino’s transfers, sourced from 4K restorations, still bear the marks of nearly century-old films. There are visible scratches and other blemishes, but the image presentations are nonetheless remarkable. Detail is consistent save only for a few wildly over-lit scenes, and even the wear from the film prints has been minimized so as to be only an occasional distraction. Often, the image is so clear that you can make out the tiniest details, like the faint lines of mildew on bathroom tiles. The soundtracks on both discs cleanly present their respective scores.Both films come with a commentary track from critic Nick Pinkerton, who draws on a wealth of biographical texts written about and even by Jean Renoir to offer thorough dissections of both Whirlpool of Fate and Nana on their own merits and within the context of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Nana also comes with a brief before-and-after restoration comparison.

Whirlpool of Fate and Nana are available on Blu-ray on July 20 from Kino Lorber.

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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