This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
Sands Films Cinema Club season of screen adaptations of the work of Emile Zola.
We continue with Renoir's adaptation (and scale down) of Zola's La Bete Humaine.
Renoir’s script doesn’t merely condense the source novel; it drastically changes its plot and narrows its scope. In the Zola, the intrigue involving the Roubaud-Séverine-Lantier triangle is only one element in more complex intrigue, encompassing, among other episodes, the slow poisoning of Flore’s mother for her inheritance; Flore’s derailment of Lantier’s train, in an attempt to kill him and Séverine; and Flore’s subsequent suicide. The investigation into the murder on the train is depicted, in elaborate detail, as an exercise in political maneuvering and judicial corruption. In the novel’s annihilating climax, Lantier and his friend Pecqueux fall to their death while fighting over their shared mistress, leaving a driverless train full of troops bound for the front racing toward destruction. Renoir’s film eliminates altogether this vision of approaching cataclysm, a symbolic representation of the utterly corrupt France of the 1860s hurtling toward the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, the France of 1938 was closer to its own debacle than Renoir could have known, but the despair he evokes in La bête humaine pertains more to individuals than to the society at large.
This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
Sands Films Cinema Club season of screen adaptations of the work of Emile Zola.
We continue with Renoir's adaptation (and scale down) of Zola's La Bete Humaine.
Renoir’s script doesn’t merely condense the source novel; it drastically changes its plot and narrows its scope. In the Zola, the intrigue involving the Roubaud-Séverine-Lantier triangle is only one element in more complex intrigue, encompassing, among other episodes, the slow poisoning of Flore’s mother for her inheritance; Flore’s derailment of Lantier’s train, in an attempt to kill him and Séverine; and Flore’s subsequent suicide. The investigation into the murder on the train is depicted, in elaborate detail, as an exercise in political maneuvering and judicial corruption. In the novel’s annihilating climax, Lantier and his friend Pecqueux fall to their death while fighting over their shared mistress, leaving a driverless train full of troops bound for the front racing toward destruction. Renoir’s film eliminates altogether this vision of approaching cataclysm, a symbolic representation of the utterly corrupt France of the 1860s hurtling toward the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, the France of 1938 was closer to its own debacle than Renoir could have known, but the despair he evokes in La bête humaine pertains more to individuals than to the society at large.