Jean Renoir's satiric gutting of René Fauchois' play is one of the director's finest works, a biting work whose ambiguous target (does it ultimately side with individualist anarchy or bourgeois liberalism?) is less the result of an unfocused screenplay than an even-handed work of humanity. With roots in Herman Melville's similarly perplexing short story "Bartleby the Scrivener," Boudu Saved from Drowning is both an absurdist ode to rebellion and a sympathetic, even positive portrayal of goodness within the oblivious bourgeoisie.The titular Boudu is the tramp qua tramps, played by that great beast Michel Simon of L'Atalante fame (or perhaps it's more accurate to say that Vigo's film later featured Simon of Boudu fame). Gigantic, scabrous, and stumbling in a way that suggests less habitual drunkenness than a body that infuses red blood cells with gin, Boudu is the Dionysian keeper of a park on the Seine. When his dog runs away, the distraught bum hurls himself off a bridge into the river, drawing a crowd of middle-class people who gasp and shriek but do nothing. It is up to a bourgeois man named Edouard Lestingois, who sees Boudu jump while mockingly watching the man through a telescope in his apartment, to run downstairs, across the street, down the bridge steps and finally, slowly leap to the man's rescue. Even the hero must maintain composure and be sure not to get all his nice clothes wet.
