"Art is born from constraint, lives through struggle and dies through liberty." --ANDRE GIDE
In Dejeuner Renoir expresses his central theme, of the recurring eternal nature of human social processes, through an unstructured melange of broadly presented themes, wild overacting, and plot which doesn't get beyond slapstick skits. The result is a truly horrifying mess.
The action of Dejeuner has no direction. It does not follow any deep personal change. The conversion of the scientist into a man of passion is absurd as far as acting style and visual realization are concerned; only because Renoir tells us so do we say that he has become a new man. It's impossible to take his action after his conversion as a serious change from his behavior before. Nor does it create a closed social milieu, or even an outdoor world of any consistency. It simply presents Renoir's themes in unprocessed, unstructured form for their own sake. We have the feeling that vaudevillians have been set against a screen and told to do their bit. The feeling comes both from the acting, which creates characters that are simply cliches, and from the visual treatment, which shows how awful a description "purely evocative" can be.
The acting style of Dejeuner is the broadest possible. Characters are built not from accurate observation of real types but from some parody of those characters as they appear in bad films or poor plays. The Girl Scout leader, for example, is solely a figure of fun with no personality. There is no subtlety in the portrayal of a chemical manufacturer, his wife who diets strictly to show off his products, or his brother, an equally greed "pure" scientist. They follow their given directions (their greed is too simple to be called a motivation) until, with the piping of Pan, all restraint is thrown off. They then instantly change (or else do not change at all) into manic characters -- the wife, for example, begins gobbling food. This either/or behavior has no middle ground, no development. None of the characters are in the least complex. They seem not to affect each other; automatons, the lack of any depicted social restraint means that their behavior will ignore the possibility of another course of action.
The visual style has no more order. Renoir's selection of close and long shot seems entirely whimsical. Shots are slapped together with little smoothness. His frequent cutting-in of thematic material (notably Pan and his goat) is just irritating. The grainy red color deprives the landscapes of any harmony and beauty; every square inch of the frame, sharing the same color quality, grates on one's eyes. The film is a long sequence of shots which oppress us by their constant clashing; the film seems to be cut for unrelieved conflict on a very low level.
Renoir is at least consistent. All these qualities make sense in terms of the themes he wants to express in Dejeuner: the irrepressible vital force of the world and of human desires, the world's natural processes as a constant small-scale battle of one entity against another, the virtue of unreason and natural conduct, the unity of flesh and spirit. But it makes no sense in personal terms. It is totally unconcerned with why men act as they do. Renoir, appealing to vague eternal concepts (Pan, the mistral, sexual lust), tries to express his views directly, without using his work of art and its structure as a medium. The result is something which is consistent but is not--an certainly not for Renoir--a work of art.
In the opening shot of Testament a little girl in medium long shot is walking down a deserted street at night. The camera is angled so that the distance of her walk is emphasized. Behind her, beside the sidewalk, is a high blank wall. She hears the tapping of a cane and, glancing behind her, begins to hurry from street-lamp to street-lamp. A grotesquely lanky, bent man overtakes her. Cornering her in the angle between the wall and a shuttered house, he beats her to death with his cane. The alarm is raised, but he escapes in the night.
The sequence knits everything into one--sexual threat, potentially traumatic childhood experience, fear, the possibility and reality of sin and death. Every image of the film sustains these themes to create Renoir's first really American movie, an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Cordelier begins as a young psychoanalyst who had denied himself all diversions to train hard and marry well for a successful practice. He thus chose for himself a respectable society which would not tolerate irregular conduct. One day he administers a sleeping draught to one of his many female patients. Seeing her unconscious on his couch, he cannot restrain himself from fondling her breast. This practice grows, but he soon realizes its dangers, and instead begins to look for a way to create a second identity. An accomplished experimenter, he invents a process for transforming his appearance, and begins to haunt the streets at night. At length discovered, he has already committed suicide upon realizing that the change was becoming permanent.
The film, instead of building a social milieu, creates a clear and consistent background against which Cordelier's actions take place. He is placed in free space against black and white. The symbolism is clear: Cordelier dresses in white and appears in brightly lit surroundings; his alter ego, in black at night. But as the film progresses Renoir places the double in daylight and Cordelier in the dark; the two are one.
The one dissolves into the other in Cordelier's laboratory, a shed barred to everyone else and filled with chemical apparatus. Here Cordelier had found a way to divide his personality and desires; he made himself two different people in two milieux. For Renoir this split cannot be tolerated. Cordelier's sexual desires were not wrong, his way of realizing them was. Escape from his society through the work of his mind only drove him to terrible acts -- tripping up cripples, murdering a child. One cannot change one's identity; one must take one's desires as they are. Trying to realize them in the world as it exists, one will lose something of one's identity by integrating it into the overall process of life.