Toni: A True Story Told by Jean Renoir

The men are often seen in groups (the lodgers, the workers at the quarry, the charcoal burners), while Marie and Josefa—the only women in the film to make more than the briefest of appearances—appear isolated. There is no female community to match the male community, which surely defies the rules of realism. Nor is there any sisterly solidarity; the first thing we hear about Josefa is Marie calling her “a female on the prowl.” Toni and Albert are also competitors, but their jealousy is rooted in their working relationship, while Marie and Josefa’s rivalry is only sexual, reinforced by a series of animal metaphors applied to them throughout the film. Marie points out that Josefa is other, foreign (“hardly speaking a word of French”), but the film otherwise goes out of its way to present a society in which class provides a stronger bond than national or regional identity, anticipating Renoir’s 1937 Grand Illusion. Notwithstanding Sebastian’s isolated remark about “dangerous Arabs,” a black worker is perfectly integrated into the group. The film clearly espouses the much-quoted line from an immigrant worker to another: “My country is wherever I can earn enough to eat.”

If the film at times falls back on gender stereotyping, it also explicitly shows women’s exploitation as part of an oppressive patriarchal culture. When Josefa serves wine to Sebastian, Gabi, and Albert, she is not invited to sit down with them, let alone take part in their discussion. As Gabi quips, “You’re part of the livestock.” Yet our sympathy with Josefa is compromised by her characterization as fickle and a tease, a view reinforced when we see her ready to follow the evidently dishonest Gabi after Albert’s death. Nowhere is the film’s ambivalence in this respect more acute than in the scene in which Albert forces himself on Josefa. The episode seems to cause unease among Renoir scholars, who have referred to it with euphemisms such as “possession,” “seduction,” or her “succumbing,” although it is clearly a rape, as intimated by several violent motifs. Albert arrives on his noisy motorbike and literally leaps toward Josefa as she is hanging laundry out to dry. He clumsily brings the clothesline down, then tears off the strap of a flimsy vest. After some rough foreplay, during which he comments on the fact that she is wearing nothing under her dress, he drags Josefa offscreen—despite her protestations that he is hurting her and that she does not want to go any further—while using a couple of ribald metaphors (“I want meat with my gravy”; “When I start a meal, I like to finish it”).

A high-angle shot shows the two figures through the branches of a tree, and, later, Josefa rising from the ground, her hair disheveled, in familiar cinematic shorthand for what has happened. Albert’s brutality has been exposed, but the film’s construction of Josefa as an “easygoing” woman who is “very good at making men chase after her”—together with her passivity after the assault (“That’s how it is,” she tells Tony)—prompts a reading in which she “asked for it.” And yet the sexual crime is shown with a degree of explicitness that was rare, if not unique, in the cinema of the time (Renoir would leave Estelle’s rape in 1936’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange offscreen, and Séverine’s in 1938’s La bête humaine safely in the past).

With the exception of the despicable Albert, the characters in Toni are complex figures—foreshadowing Renoir’s famous pronouncement in The Rules of the Game (1939): “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Josefa, realizing that Toni has claimed he killed Albert to save her, goes to the police to confess (too late, as it turns out), and Marie, despite having thrown Toni out, sends him food and wine, saying, “I don’t want to see him again, but I wish him no harm.” The two women, ostensibly the source of discord, are not made responsible for men’s failings. Nevertheless, Toni struggles to see them as social beings in the same way that men are, reflecting the wider context of France between the wars, when women were controlled by oppressive patriarchal codes and had to fight hard to assert themselves, including professionally. This was the case in the film industry as elsewhere.

The Pour vous article on the shoot of Toni lists members of the crew, in addition to the cast. They are very nearly all men: director, producer, director of photography, set photographer, etc. Only one woman appears, as “Marguerite,” with a teasing question: “Script girl? Yes, of course, but much more than that too.” It is unclear whether the writer is talking about “Marguerite” in her capacity as Renoir’s partner in life or as the editor and, indeed, continuity super­visor (“script girl”) of the film, or both. Marguerite Houllé (known professionally as Marguerite Renoir or sometimes Houllé-Renoir, although they never married) appears in the credits of Toni as coeditor, alongside Suzanne de Troeye, the two of them billed together as “Mmes Marguerite et S. de Troeye.” It was not unusual then for editors, who were almost always women, to double as “script girls.” Like being a secretary, the latter role was assumed to require “feminine” qualities. That patronizing “Mme Marguerite,” also a common convention at the time, speaks volumes about the way such professions mirrored women’s condition at large. Yet Houllé played another crucial role in Renoir’s life and on Toni. A Communist who had been born into a working-class family, she had introduced Renoir to political commitment, and it was likely through her intercession that Renoir and his team were invited to Moscow to show Toni. The film would not be a financial success, but its positive critical reception consolidated Renoir’s reputation as a filmmaker of the left. Houllé’s influence on Renoir would continue to bear fruit in the extraordinary series of films examining the condition of French working people that he made with her collaboration in the thirties, of which Toni was the first.