LA BETE HUMAINE

by Kevin Koehler

One of the first symbols they teach you about in film critic school (Symbolism Clichés 101) is the big, black locomotive, which represents male sexual libido. Blame Freud and, well, your id. Man is a sexual beast and his dreams - the manifestation of an unconscious mind allowed to conjure any vision fathomable – are mostly the repeated image of his own sex organ.

Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast) has a lot of locomotives, so many in fact that it probably slots in between The General and Murder on the Orient Express on the all-time list of most locomotive-saturated frames per minute of running time. Those pictures, perhaps surprisingly, are relatively free of sexual menace (though the Agatha Christie adaptation features the always phallic death by stabbing, if you're so inclined – a little more on this later). The same cannot be said of Humaine, a film that doesn't just feature the darker elements of our carnal natures, but is consumed by them.

Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin from Renoir's own Grand Illusion) is a train engineer. His dirty clothes and ashen face camouflage him with the locomotive on which he rides - man and (sex) machine appear as one. A faulty axel on "Lison" will foreshadow Lantier's own "mechanical" problem where he visits a lady friend and attempts to have his way (where else?) beside some train tracks; overcome by feelings of inadequacy in the face of (what we can only presume) an inability to consummate, he throttles her for his own impotence. A passing train interrupts his manic and violent outburst and Lantier is immediately regretful, blaming some ambiguous and undiagnosed disease of the blood he believes was passed to him from grandfather to father to son. "Is that part of your illness?" she asks him. She means the hands that were about her throat and not the passing train, though she might as well have.

The other doomed man of this story is amiable stationmaster Roubaud (Fernard Ledoux), introduced as he reprimands a rich man for walking his dog on the train platform. It might be petty but Roubaud shows no favorites regardless of class or connections. "Some people need to be taught a lesson," says the woman who brought the complaint. Roubaud agrees, or at least thinks he does. As is usually the case, the person that brings about his eventual downfall is Roubaud himself... but he has an accomplice.

Enter his much-too-pretty-for-a-schlub-like-him wife, Severine (Simone Simon), who spends her days tending to caged birds on their balcony (whose symbolism need not be elaborated upon), shopping, and cuckolding poor, naive Roubaud with the men of the neighborhood. One of these men happens to be an individual of some social standing and a former employer, Grandmorin - Roubaud's discovery of this wealthy man's intimate knowledge of his wife infuriates him to the point of premeditated murder (by stabbing, the modus operandi of every sexually frustrated killer) aboard - you guessed it - a train. Unfortunately for Roubaud, a witness in Lantier is standing a few feet away when the crime takes place and the fate of two men become intertwined.

Though not to the extent of his Upstairs/Downstairs farce La Regle du Jeu, Renoir here is overtly aware of class relationships and class warfare (one memorable scene takes place as the train workers scrape their dinner out of cans, congratulating each other on how much money they saved their bosses on coal that day – the technology that brings us together also divides), even expressing some welcome cynicism at the working class hero vs. robber baron boiler plates that tend to dominate. Roubaud does not want Grandmorin's "cast offs," a strange thing to call one's wife no matter how far she's been passed around. He does, however, have no problem taking the dead man's wallet - only to deflect blame and the attention of law enforcement, of course (and wouldn't it be a waste to just throw out all this money?).

Later, Severine (whose infidelity prompted the original bloodshed) is practically gifted to Lantier by her husband, an exchange for the man's silence. Inevitably, when a budding romance blooms between the two, it does so at night in a lamp-lit train yard. Peering up at a big, black locomotive locomotive, Serverine asks Lantier "May I get on?" "You'll get all dirty," he says.

Indeed.

Interesting footnote: Director Jean Renoir is the son of famed expressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was the subject of many of his father's works in which he is often portrayed, at best, sexual ambiguous, and at worst, as a girl, resulting in much childhood torment at the hands of bullies. See the painting Jean Renoir Sewing for one particularly egregious example.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.