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FRENCH CANCAN
1955
Director
Jean Renoir
Starring
Jean Gabin
Françoise Arnoul
María Félix
Runtime
104 minutes
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Nineteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in Jean Renoir’s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays the wily impresario Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beautiful women - an Egyptian belly-dancer and a naive working girl turned cancan star.
FRENCH CANCAN is a highlight from Renoir’s late-career work, the film is the first he made in France after a long period of exile in the U.S., and its many pleasures - including a cameo by Edith Piaf and dazzling cinematography that recalls the impressionism of the director’s own father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir - showcase a master reveling in the artifice of his medium. This celebration of life, art and the City of Light is a Technicolor tour de force.
“Renoir remains a compassionate observer of the sheer strangeness and variety of existence. It would be an oversimplification to describe him as a humanist, and it would be a mistake to confuse his pantheistic fatalism with aimlessness and artlessness. Only repeated viewings of Renoir’s films uncover the inexorable logic and lucidity of his style. Still, of all his films, FRENCH CANCAN is the one that bursts out again and again with lyrical explosions of color, vitality, and sensuality. There is unmistakably more to Renoir than meets the eye, but what an eye he has.” - Andrew Sarris
“FRENCH CANCAN pretty much covers everything - everyone is a performer, reality is more theatrical than theater, and theater is more real than reality. Yet at the same time, to be a performer as once professions necessitates one be outside of life. It's not beautiful nor tragic, because it is both at once. It’s Renoir’s greatest work.” - Neil Bahadur
FRENCH CANCAN is a highlight from Renoir’s late-career work, the film is the first he made in France after a long period of exile in the U.S., and its many pleasures - including a cameo by Edith Piaf and dazzling cinematography that recalls the impressionism of the director’s own father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir - showcase a master reveling in the artifice of his medium. This celebration of life, art and the City of Light is a Technicolor tour de force.
“Renoir remains a compassionate observer of the sheer strangeness and variety of existence. It would be an oversimplification to describe him as a humanist, and it would be a mistake to confuse his pantheistic fatalism with aimlessness and artlessness. Only repeated viewings of Renoir’s films uncover the inexorable logic and lucidity of his style. Still, of all his films, FRENCH CANCAN is the one that bursts out again and again with lyrical explosions of color, vitality, and sensuality. There is unmistakably more to Renoir than meets the eye, but what an eye he has.” - Andrew Sarris
“FRENCH CANCAN pretty much covers everything - everyone is a performer, reality is more theatrical than theater, and theater is more real than reality. Yet at the same time, to be a performer as once professions necessitates one be outside of life. It's not beautiful nor tragic, because it is both at once. It’s Renoir’s greatest work.” - Neil Bahadur