Film 
(4/5) DVD 
(4.5/5)
I have recently seen the Master of Cinema critical edition of “Toni”, published by Eureka in a great DVD. The 1934 film is Renoir’s landmark entry into realist filmmaking and, through Luchino Visconti, assistant director on “Toni”, it holds its place as front-runner of Italian Neorealism. The challenge of the film was to shoot a real story in a real location with real people. The story is about a ten year old crime that has taken place in the little French town of Les Martigues. The chief of Police, who was a friend of Renoir and a passionate writer, published a report based on the police record. Starting from there, Renoir goes back to Les Martigues, selects professional and non-professional actors with the same working class Italian and Spanish background and then proceeds to set everything in the original location where the story took place. The greatest challenge for Renoir was to produce a film that followed the real events whilst trying to avoid the dramatic overtones often employed to tell such a story.
Toni arrives from Italy to work in a quarry and then falls for Marie. He then meets the Spaniard Josefa, the daughter of a wine farmer, and proposes to her. Josefa, however, decides to marry Albert, Toni’s superintendent at the quarry, so Toni decides to marry Marie instead. Toni and Marie have discussions all the time, whilst Albert betrays and beats Josefa. After the last drama, Toni moves out of the house, desperate to get Josefa back. In the meanwhile, Josefa and her lover, Gabi, have planned to kill Albert and escape with the money. Events, however, take a tragic turn, which ultimately leads to Toni’s death.
“Renoir is constantly concerned to defuse the melodrama inherent in the situations, often with an unexpected touch of humor. He rarely focuses on dramatic climaxes in an attempt to milk their effect” suggests Tom Milne in the acute essay in the DVD’s booklet. And indeed beyond the photographic record of the period and the revolutionary audio track recording music and dialects, like the patois that were never hear before in a cinema, the film stands out for the work done in containing dramatic overtone. Seventy-five years later, “Toni” remains an extremely fresh and modern film. Despite Renoir’s tendency towards ‘primitivism’, the subtractive directing allows the material to come forward little by little, without being pushed by an overuse of dramatic devices. So, in fact, instead of being a pre-neorealist film, “Toni” employs a late-neorealist aesthetic of subtraction and anti-dramatic story telling.
The DVD has been excellently restored and edited, with a good video introduction by NFT programmer Geoff Andrew and a less than satisfactory full length audio commentary by Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate. The DVD, however, comes with an extraordinarily well-binded 28-page booklet containing several interviews with Renoir on the film and the reprint of Tom Milne’s 1980 review.
Director: Jean Renoir Script: Jean Renoir, Jacques Levert, Carl Einstein Photo: Claude Renoir Music: Paul Bozzi Cast: Andrex (Gaby), Charles Blavette (Antonio Canova), Paul Bozzi (Jacques Bozzi), Max Dalban (Albert), Edouard Delmont (Fernand), Jenny Hélia (Marie), André Kovachevitch (Sebastian), Celia Montalván (Josepha) Country: France Language: French Runtime: 100 min; B&W Aka: Les Amours de Toni
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