The Cinema of Masks: Commedia dell’Arte and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach

Des O’Rawe

[The Golden Coach] was a film in which I tried to enclose one performance inside another. I tried, if you like, to erase the borders between the representation of reality and the reality itself. I tried to establish a kind of confusion between acting on a theatrical stage and acting in life. I don’t know whether I really achieved my goal, but in any case it was truly interesting to try it. Jean Renoir1

According to Eric Rohmer, The Golden Coach (1953) represents “the ‘open sesame’” of all Jean Renoir’s work.”2 Certainly, its theatrical qualities are in keeping with a very Renoirean attachment to the mysterious intimacy between theatre and life – the nature of role-playing and the paradox of performance: “Even when there is no theatre or stage involved, Renoir can give a feeling which is less film than theatre.”3 The theatrical, and the art of acting in particular, is as integral to the action and mise en scène of Renoir’s early films – such as Nana (1926) and La Chienne (1931) – as it is to the guignol world of his last film, Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1970). In Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932), the kindly Lestingois, in saving his “perfect tramp,” inadvertently invites Dionysus to dinner. At the beginning of Une Partie de campagne (1936), the borrowed milk-cart that carries Dufour and his family into the countryside seems also to be conveying a troupe of unwitting players onto a new stage. In La Grande Illusion (1937), the prisoners’ theatrical revue is suddenly interrupted by news from the front, by a reality from which there is no hope of escape. In this sense, The Golden Coach (like its contemporary companion pieces, French Can-Can (1955) and Éléna et les hommes (1956)) is no mere product of a “late Renoir” whose cinema had become disconnected from its own past. The Golden Coach – with its mélange of movement, colour and musicality – reaffirms the profound coherence of Renoir’s cinematic vision and its debt to the bittersweet genius of commedia dell’arte. Commedia dell’arte flourished in sixteenth century Italy and became a popular theatrical form throughout Europe before many of its comic routines (lazzi) and archetypical characters became assimilated into the more literary and moralistic dramas of the eighteenth century and after. Commedia dell’arte, as its name suggests, was above all an actor’s theatre in which everything depended on witty improvisation, expressive gesturality, and the 148 The Cinema of Masks ______skilful use of mask and costume.4 The set was entirely decorative and it functioned as a familiar prop rather than as an elaborate source of diegetic information. Normally distinguished from its more sophisticated counterpart, commedia erudite (which was scripted, devoid of masks and performed indoors), commedia dell’arte deployed a very visual and non-naturalistic style of performance that demanded remarkable agility from its actors. Any routines that were rehearsed (like the presence of stock characters: Columbine, Harlequin, Pierrot, Punchinello, and Pantalone, etc.) formed part of a template for comic improvisation and inventiveness. While commedia dell’arte was non-literary, it was not a-literary: virtually all performances (as with The Golden Coach) conformed to a three-act structure. Paradoxically, these and other dramaturgical conventions actually produced the myriad of improvisations – and that mood of general playfulness – with which commedia dell’ arte has long been synonymous. The rules were the game and they guaranteed the comic authenticity of each action, gesture and comment: the sudden turn of a mask, the startling collision of two colours, the timing of a witty riposte. Inevitably, there is much debate about the traditions and historical evolution of commedia dell’arte:

Since the seventeenth century many myths have accumulated in many countries about commedia dell’arte: that it was a single entity, that it was artistically self- contained and well-defined, that it was spontaneously improvised, drew much on “popular” materials and was essentially of the “popular” meridian, that it trafficked mainly in “low” comedy, and was rooted in the physical and acrobatic antics of the masked players. The historical reality, however, was rather different. 5

Renoir, for his part, was always less concerned with the reproduction of an historical reality than with a much more modernist enterprise: the cinematic rendering of a pure fiction that yields a moment of reality. For Renoir, commedia dell’arte, like the guignol and the Can-Can, was more than simply a rough theatre for the common people. While its exaggerations and comic directness were “carnivalesque” and had their origins in a pre-Enlightenment world of fixed social orders and strong communal ties, they also anticipated modernity. Commedia dell’arte was, after all, an essentially experimental art form in which prefabricated scenarios and archetypical characterisations liberated each performance from a requirement to be “realistic” in the naturalistic sense. This was “a purely artificial environment” that was not obliged to dramatise plots rich in