Keith READER the circular ruins

FmubSlmlia, VoL LTV, No. 5, 287-297

THE CIRCULAR RUINS? FRONTIERS, EXILE AND THENATION IN RENOIR'S LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE

K E I T H READER

H fut un moment o i les Franpais crurent vraiment qu'ils allaient s'aimer les uns lesautrcs.1Democracy is always tied to the 'pathological' fact of a nation-state.2

Jean Renoir's 1936 film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is generally numberedamong its director's most important works, as well as being one of the keyfilms of the Popular Front period in France. That reputation rests to a greatextent upon the well-documented community spirit that pervaded its making,largely die result of the participation of many members of the leftist theatreGroupe Octobre, which was run on lines not dissimilar to the co-operativethat forms the centre of die film's action. Three years later, just before hisdefining masterpiece La Regie dujtu was released, Renoir was to confide in aletter to his partner Camille Francois his ambition to expand the communalfilm-making style of Lange into ' "une espece d'Artistes Associes, e'est-a-dired'une entreprise beaucoup plus large et plus desinteressee que celle quiconsiste simplement a faire de la distribution" '.3 That dream was to come tonaught, in a manner that we shall see suggests intriguing parallels betweenthe ambiguous fate of LangSs co-operative and Renoir's subsequent,particularly post-war career.

One of the Groupe Octobre's moving spirits was die film's scriptwriter,Jacques Prevert Prevert is best known cinematically for the screenplays hewrote for Marcel Carne (such as Le Jour se live of 1939 and Les Enfants duparadis of 1943); Lange, despite a couple of further projects that neverprogressed beyond die discussion stage,4 was his only collaboration withRenoir.

Neither Renoir nor Prevert was ever a member of the French CommunistParty, for reasons which were almost diametrically opposed. Renoir wrote aregular Wednesday column in the PCF's cultural daily Ce soir in 1937 and

1 Jean Renoir, Ma vie et mtsfilms (Paris, Flammarion, 1974), p. 114.2 Slavoj Zizck, Looking Awry: An Intmduftwn to jucquts Loan through Dipolar Cuhun (Cambridge,

MA—London, MTT Press, 1991), p. 16 j .3 Jean Renoir, Comspondana: ipij—if/t, ed. by David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco (Paris,

Plon, 1998), p. 71.4 Details of these are to be found in Andre Heinrich's introduction to the screenplays of Lt Crime

dt Monsiatr Langc/Lts Fbrtts di lenuil (Paris, Gallimard, 1990), p. 21.

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288 KEITH READER

1938,5 but this was not to prevent him from going to Mussolini's Rome in1939 and 1940 in an abortive attempt to make a film of La Tosca, of whichonly five sequences were ever shot — an undertaking which cost him thefriendship of Aragon among others. His first return from Italy in September1939, when France declared a general mobilization, all but coincided with diesigning of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, by which he — unlike, presumably,Aragon — was scandalized.6 All this, like the remark quoted as an epigraph,helps to suggest why Renoir's sympathies for the Popular Front very rapidlyturned into nostalgia for the good old days of Groupe Octobre copinage. ForFranpois Poulle, to speak of a 'sell-out' on Renoir's part would be to make acategory mistake. His Communist sympathies were precisely that, sympathies,shared 'affectivement, instinctivement, sans raisonnement, sans dure neces-site personnelle',7 so that in the 'fraternite de copains qui se disloquait' [. . .][i]l ne voyait pas plus loin que le pain mange ensemble'.8

Renoir's genially communitarian version of socialism may now seem tohave worn rather better than the Stalinist asperities of the PCF or evenPrevert's maverick amalgam of anarchism and Trotskyism, which made thelatter a forerunner of what thirty or so years later was to become known asgauchisme. It is unsurprising that along with Sartre he was among the first ofhis generation to express sympathy with those events of May 1968 initially soreviled by the Communist Party. If the Groupe Octobre, founded in 1932,lasted barely more man a month after the Popular Front's election victory,that was largely because of its and Prevert's hostility to certain CommunistParty policies. 'Les couplets anticlericaux ne s'accordent pas avec la politiquede la main tendue, liiostilite a l'armee et la police, que partageait L'Humanitiaux temps revolus de la rubrique "Gueules de vaches", devient incompatibleavec le slogan "Vive Tannee republicaine", et en fait est intempestive depuisles accords Laval-Staline'.9 Renoir's French Revolution fresco La Marseillaise(1937), largely scripted by die director, vividly illustrates the divergencebetween Prevert and himself. An early scene depicts poverty-strickenpeasants and workers, on the run from the feudal law, hiding out in the hillsnear Marseille. Here they are succoured by a priest who explicidy identifieshis situation widi diat of sergeants in the army — exploited, poorly paid, andwidiout hope of advancement under die current system. A clearer exampleof the 'politique de la main tendue,' recruiting rank-and-file representatives

* Many of these are reproduced in Jean Renoir, Merits: 1926-1971 (Paris, Belfond, 1974).6 'Pareille alliance semblait inimaginable. II pensait a l'espoir de la bande du Groupe Octobre

pendant qu'ils tournaient Le Crime de Monsieur Langs et La Vie est a noa?: Cclia Berlin, Jean Renoir(Paris, fiditions du Rocher, 1994), p. n j

7 Francois Poulle, Renoir rfji on jean Renoir pour rial ?—tnquite sttr un dntastt (Paris, Editions du Cerf,*&>),?• M4-

* Renoir ipjf on Jean Renoir pour rien ?, p. 115.9 Geraldi Leroy and Anne Roche, Les Ecrivains et U Frontpcpuhnrt (Paris, Presses de la Fondation

Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1986), p. 181.

RENOIR'S LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANCE 289

of two hated institutions onto the side of progress, it would be difficult tofind. Prevert's priest in Lange, by contrast, is a fatuous bumbler who is killedin a railway accident and whose garb is then opportunistically donned by therascally employer Batala — a masquerade whose anti-clerical implication isevident

On a visit to a theatre festival in Moscow in 1933, Prevert, along withMarcel Duhamel and Yves Allegret, refused to sign a book of congratulationsto Stalin, which suggests that he would have been deeply suspicious of theStalinist attempt to build socialism in one country, figured in microcosm inLange by the co-operative's fragile albeit exhilarating setting-up of a kind of'socialism in one courtyard'. The film's construction and deployment ofspace, narrative and topographical alike, counterposes to its warm sense ofcommunity an acute, possibly even tragic irony — an irony intimately linkedwith the relationship between the Popular Front as a national phenomenon{'les Frattfais crurent vraiment qu'ils allaient s'aimer les uns les autres') and theinternationalism of Prevert's perspective. The '"pathological" fact of anation-state' alluded to by Zizek, and extensively developed in his work, isthe point at which the coherence of Langfs argument calls itself intoquestion. Depending on which version of Lacan we adopt, that 'nationalfact' is either the signifying absence at the heart of the text or the 'Thing',the objet a, the 'real' which renders any self-sufficient closed totalityimpossible.

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange tells of a group of people living and workingaround a courtyard in the Marais area of Paris (the film's original workingtide was SUT la cour). That neighbourhood underwent spectacular renovationand gentrification in the 1960s, under die aegis of Andre Malraux's CultureMinistry, but at the time of the film it was still largely working-class, with thevertical relations of community and kinship characteristic of the Parisiantenement The printing works owned by die camp and repellent Batala (JulesBerry) is in severe financial difficulties as a result of his mismanagementWhen he stages his disappearance and death in a rail accident, the workerstake over and run the print firm on a co-operative basis, achieving immensesuccess dianks to the 'Arizona Jim' Western stories written by the unworldlyAmedee Lange (Rene Lefevre). Batala, however, is still the firm's legal owner;disguised as a priest he returns to claim his legal if not moral due at the heightof a celebratory banquet held by the co-operative, and Lange, in a daze,shoots him dead, securing the co-operative's future at the potential cost ofhis own life. Lange and his lover, the laundress Valentine (Florelle), aredriven to the frontier by the benevolent capitalist supporter of the co-operative Meunier. Recognized as fugitives in a cafe, they are able to reachsafety after Valentine has told their story to the people in the bar. The finalshot shows them walking along a flat, and fairly gloomy, beach towardssafety, turning to wave farewell to dieir allies and to the camera.

290 KEITH READER

With Le Crime de MonsieurLange, to quote Alexander Sesonske, 'Jean Renoirundoubtedly became the film director of the Left'.10 This commitment maynot have lasted long, but its strength and the extraordinary results it producedcertainly made him a marked man once France had fallen, and thus helped toprovoke his departure for the USA at the very end of 1940. The film'scelebration of community, its denunciation of Batala's sexual exploitation ofhis female employees, its condoning of what Dudley Andrew has pointedout is effectively a political assassination11 retain immense force to diisday — a force that resides as much in die visual organization of the film asin its narrative. The courtyard, at once home and workplace, a microcosm ofle Parispopulairt and a latter-day avatar of die Pension Vauquer in Balzac's LePert Goriot, is at the centre of that visual organization, which Andre Bazin hasmemorably shown has implications that go well beyond its boundaries.

Bazin's analysis hinges on what is usually described as 'die 3600 pan' (it isactually nearer 2700) around die courtyard immediately before Lange killsBatala — an infringement of classic cinema's so-called '180° rule' whichprescribes diat die camera should not normally move dirough more dian asemicircle, for fear of disrupting die spectator's position. This shot wasdiought by Roger Leenhardt, normally a most incisive critic, to be die resultof a blunder or shortage of money12 — a judgement nowadays easy to mock,but we should perhaps recall diat audiences found the flashback structure ofCarne's he Jour se leve difficult to follow on die film's release in 1939... The3600 pan, on its rare appearances in the cinema, tends to evoke a precarioussense of community, as in die shot before die cattle drive moves off inHawks's Red River of 1948, and diat is certainly die case here.13 For Bazin,Renoir's 3600 shot functions as Texpression spatiale pure de toute la mise enscene',14 a mise en scene which die seeming circularity of die courtyard'scobblestones, and die drunken concierge's reeling round it as he struggles toput out die dusubins, go to reinforce. It also, of course, calls die very ride ofdie film into question, twice over. The shot's evocation of community — acommunity direatened by Batala's emergence from die shadows widi legal ifnot ediical right on his side — acts to legitimize die shooting (is it really a'crime'?), and at die same time to locate responsibility for it away from Langehimself (is it *Monsieur Lange's crime'?). If ever a camera movement hasperformed a political action, it is surely here.

10 Jean Renoir The French Films, 19)4-1939 (Cambridge, MA—London, Harvard University Press,1980), p. 186.

Mists o/Regnl (Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 287.12 See Andre Bizin, Jean Renoir (Paris, Champ Libre, 1971), p. 39.13 Godard — author of the notorious axiom les travellings sont affaire de morale' — also makes

use of a 3600 pan in Weekend, there to illustrate the tedium with which a Mozart piano recital in aNormandy farmyard is received.

14 Bazin,/fc«i Renoir, p. 42.

RENOIR'S LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANCE 291

This reading — which my subsequent comments will, I hope, inflectradier than undercut — gains added force from the circular structure of thefilm's narrative. This is told in flashback by Valentine to the customers in thecafe who have recognized Lange from his description, and who at the end ofher story, and thus of the film, allow the couple to go free. Daniel Serceauhas observed how le recit de Valentine devient image cinematographiquepour nous spectateurs comme il est image mentale pour les consommateursdu cafe', so that:Nous nous plapons a la fois en-depa ct au-dela de nos correspondants dans lc cafe. En-deca, car nous ne disposons pas du droit dc liberer ou d'emprisonner qui est(fictivement) le leur. Au-dela, car nous substituons aux images mentales qu'ilsproduisent, les images reelles d'une fiction.15

To the circularity of die courtyard, the 3600 shot and the narration, then,corresponds a concentric arrangement of two sets of 'jurors' who sit injudgement, not only on Lange's action but on Valentine's narration. Thereare indeed quite literally two 'courts' within the film — the courtyard in Parisand die impromptu bar-room tribunal populaire, as the Maoists would havecalled it, which sits in judgement not only on Lange, but by implication onthe whole Parisian co-operative endeavour. The one dissenter from theverdict in the cafe is the owner's son, denounced as an imbecile by everybodyincluding his own father, which seems to confirm the widespread view thatdissident or recalcitrant elements in Lc Crime de Monsieur Lange's view ofcommunity can safely be marginalized as buffoons. The concierge,M. Beznard — in die published script, "Baisenard' — with his sly boastingabout his experiences with Tonkinois women and old-soldier racism ('LesIndiens . . . les Tonkinois . . . e'est kif-kif . . . des Negres, quoi . . . Pas dementalite . . . et faineants avec ca . . . sournois'16), is the best example of this,even though for Alexander Sesonske he is partially 'redeemed' by his drunkenperformance at the party, where he 'becomes die source for die rhythm onwhich the scene is built'.17 With die bar-owner's son contemptuouslyneutralized and Beznard transformed from obnoxious into entertainingbuffoon, it is tempting to read the film as an allegory of the triumph of classsolidarity.

Tempting, but in many ways simplistic. The role of the 'good' capitalistMeunier is too crucial to be passed over, and Christopher Faulkner'sdescription of him as 'the reservation to the complete socialization of themeans of production of the printshop'18 is a point well taken. Batala fails socalamitously, after all, because he is an inefficient capitalist, not because he is

15 Jean Rendr Pinsurgl (Paris, Sycomore, 1981), p. 61.16 Jacques Prevert, Le Crime dt Monsieur Lange/Les Fbrtes de la nut (Paris, Gallimard, 1990), p. 74.17 Jean Renoir. Tbe French Films, 1934-19)9, p. 211." The SodaJCinema ojJean Renoir (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 65.

292 KEITH READER

a repulsive one, and Meunier's twofold intervention, as financial saviour andas chauffeur to safety, can easily be read as figuring the necessity of the rightkind of capitalist, in a way that brings the film closer to Richard Branson (oreven Bernard Tapie) than to Karl Marx. Often commented on, too, has beenthe elegiac quality of the film's ending. To quote Sesonske once more:Langc and Valentine are free, 'so they say', but exiled from the court that held theirlives, and, after the shock of his real encounter with death, we are not sure Lange willever again write with the same careless delight, 'Arizona Jim killed one or two of them'.Hence the final image of these two lonely figures receding on the windswept dunesconveys as much of sadness as of joy.19

That sadness, only a few years before refugees in flight were once again tobecome a familiar sight on the roads of Europe, is intensified by Lange andValentine's utter lack of possessions — not even a suitcase between them —and by the soundtrack's repetition of 'Au jour le jour', the song Valentine hasearlier sung to Lange which suggests that she may once have had to resort toprostitution and closes on the line: 'C'est une triste vie'. It is difficult to viewthe final sequence now without reading back into it the ending of Renoir'sFirst World War-set La Grande Illusion (1937), in which Rosenthal andMarechal (Marcel Dalio and Jean Gabin) make their escape across the snow-covered frontier between Germany and Switzerland. As they cross intoneutral territory the commander of the pursuing German troops orders hismen to lower their weapons, attesting to the performative effectiveness ofthe border despite, or perhaps because of, its invisibility. Such respect for theconventions of 'civilized' warfare — part of the 'great illusion' of the film'stide — was not of course to survive into the post-1939 world, which givesthe ending an ironic quality that brings it closer to that of Lange than may atfirst appear.

The importance of the frontier is the key to understanding how the ironywith which Le Crime de Monsieur Lange's 'triumph' is tempered, quite as muchas that of La Grande Illusion, is closely connected with the ' "pathological" factof a nation-state' referred to by Zizek, and thus with the broader (and somewould say still unresolved) political debates surrounding the time of thefilm's making. Lyall Bush states that at the end of the film Lange andValentine cross 'the border into Spain'20— an assertion belied by the bottleof home-made genever prominent in the bar, which would seem to place itnear the Belgian frontier. The reference to Spain may well have beeninfluenced by the importance of the Spanish border as an escape route forrefugees in the Second World War, and before that in the opposite directionduring the Spanish Civil War. Christopher Faulkener has drawn attention to

"JeanRenoir. TheFrenchFilms, 19)4-19)9, p. 196.2 0 "Female Narrative and the Law in Renoir's Le Crime dt Monsieur Lang?, Cinema Journal 19.1 (Fall

•989) .P-5 5-

RENOIR S LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE 293

the influence of the Spanish Catalan Joan Catanya/Jean Castagnier on Lange,further pointing out that an early version of the screenplay actually sets theopening sequence on the Spanish border.21 Yet it is scarcely plausible thatMeunier would have run the risk of driving so far south. Plausibility,however, goes on to raise die mildly disconcerting question of why thefleeing couple stop for the night on the French — 'unsafe' — side of theborder. Meunier tells them that 'A la premiere heure, vous pourrez passer lafrondere',22 which might suggest the availability of a passeur to guide diemacross once it becomes light; but no such figure is seen in the final sequence,and by morning presumably their description will have been communicatedto the border police. . . The obvious answer to my question is, of course, thatdiere would otherwise have been no film, or at any rate no framing narrativeand dius no possibility of putting class solidarity to the test Beyond this,however, it seems to me that the film's difficulty in escaping the confines ofFrance is emblematic of what Zizek calls 'die eruption of the national Thingin all its violence [which] has always taken the devotees of internationalsolidarity by surprise'.23

Five years after Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was made, the Popular Front-dominated Chambre des Deputes was to confer full State powers uponMarshal Petain, thus effectively voting for its own destitution. The 'socialismin one courtyard' of the film's community, which acts as a microcosm atonce of Paris (itself a metonym for France) and of the French working class,has already been shown to be dependent upon the good grace of capitalistbenignity and to be potentially direatened from within by xenophobicfeelings, however comically expressed. If Prevert's internationalist perspec-tive reinscribes itself at die end of die film, it is only after a draining,potentially fatal struggle. Lyall Bush's view that the border represents 'a tropefor die futility of "escape" from ideology, or the gaze, or die hailing camera.The last crossing is a retreat much more dian a transgressive act'24 is certainlyreinforced by die spatial construction of die final shot, die direct negation ofdie Paris-set 3 6o° pan and the circularides diat have led up to it The shot isbleakly horizontal, depicting windswept dunes widi no human habitation;the 18o° rule is flouted, to be sure, when Lange and Valendne turn to waveto the camera, but by way of farewell rather than of greedng. They are, afterall, as we have seen, being forced into exile.

That exile offers striking parallels not only with Renoir's later work, suchas La Grande Illusion, but with his life and development after die outbreak of

21 Christopher Faulkener, Taris, Arizona; on the redemption of difference: Jean Renoir's Le Crimede Monsieur Lange', in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. by Susan Hayward and GinetteVincendeau (second editon: London — New York, Roudedge, 2000), p. 38.

22 he Crim de Monsieur Lange/Lts Portts dt la nut, p . 29.23 Looking Awry, p . 65.24 'Female Narra t ive and the Law in Renoir 's Le Cnme de Monsieur Lang? p . 67.

294 KEITH READER

war. La Regie dujeu was such a spectacular failure on its release in 1939 thatRenoir felt tempted to leave France altogether well before 1941, when hefinally arrived in Hollywood. The savage public and critical response to thefilm now appears a triumphant endorsement of its extraordinary innovat-iveness and vicious social criticism, but at the time it spelt doom for Renoir'sTJnited Artists a lafrartfaise' even before the war destroyed such dreams onceand for all. The Occupation's restructuring of the French industry, we shouldrecall, placed it on a far more sophisticated industrial footing than before,which can be seen as having brought about major changes in the type offilms made. For Alan Williams,It is most obviously the freewheeling, heterogeneous approach to filmic form andcontent taken by Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, and others before the war — theimprovisational feel and the sense of openness to a world which extends beyond theboundaries of the cinema screen — which was conspicuously absent in the newapproach to film-making.25

The contrast between the static, nostalgic narrative quality and subject-matter of such Occupation films as Carne's Les Visiteurs du soir and Becker'sGoupimcdns rouges (both 1943) and Renoir's great works of the 1930s,explicable as much by the threat of censorship as by industrial reorganization,is certainly a striking one.26 In this respect it is certainly possible to see theending of Lange as a preemptive elegy for Renoir's shattered dreams of a co-operative industry, and more generally as foreshadowing the direction of hispost-war career. For Janet Bergstrom, as for the vast majority of writers onRenoir, his post-war films, whether shot in Hollywood or in Europe, aremarkedly inferior to the 1930s masterworks. Bergstrom is particularly severeon French Can-Can (1955), his first post-war French film, deeming it 'abetrayal of the intelligent, socially evocative filmmaking Renoir had excelledin before the war'.27 For Bergstrom, Renoir's long-delayed return to Francehad estranged him definitively from his '1930s realist mode',28 so that FrenchCan-Can 'would qualify as a perfectly respectable Hollywood film'.29 Notonly that; its regression to the place (Montmartre), and very nearly the time,of Renoir's own childhood, along with its comparatively conventional plot

25 Rtpublit oflmagss: A History of French Film-Making (Cambridge , M A — L o n d o n , Ha rva rd Universi tyPress, 1992), p . 263.

26 T h e view taken, for example , by Jean-Pierre Jeancolas in Quince ans d'annks trente: It dnima disFrancois ryip—ififj (Paris, Stock, 1983) that there was a fundamental cont inu i ty be tween pre-war andOccupation cinema also has a great deal to be said for it, but in the particular case of Renoir itseems considerably less relevant27 J e a n Renoir ' s Re turn to France ' , in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travellers, Outsiders, Backward

Glances, ed. by Susan Rubin Suleiman, ( D u r h a m , N C — L o n d o n , D u k e Universi ty Press , 1998),p . 186.

28 'Jean Renoir 's Re turn to France' , p . 206.29 Jean Renoir's Return to France', p. 216.

RENOIR'S LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE 295

and dubious gender politics, place it for her with those tendencies in post-war French cinema that carried on where the films of the Occupation yearsleft off It is not necessary to share all the strictures of Bergstrom's view ofthe film (I for one do not) to appreciate the more general validity of herargument Renoir's view of France in Frtnch Can-Can is primarily oneconstructed for an American audience, which may well have been the onlyway for him to have made a 'French' film in the 1950s. Yet for Poulle andBergstrom alike that meant that he had, as Zizek might put it, lost his'national Thing', metonymically represented by the values triumphantlyrealized on both sides of the camera in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. In thatcontext Lange and Florelle, as they wave farewell, are doing so in a mannermore far-reaching than they, or Renoir, could have imagined at the time.

Is Le Crime de Monsieur Lange's buoyant vision of community and solidarity,then, destroyed by its ending? Does 'the national Thing' in all its horizontalinescapability and nearly suicidal hesitation short of the border nullify thecollective sweep of the 3 6o° shot, reducing it to what my title (drawn from aBorges short story) calls 'circular ruins?' To answer 'yes', quite apart fromretroactively invalidating years of teaching the film, would be to disregardthe importance, the positive value, for Renoir of that very 'national Thing'that at the same time menaces the dreams and lives of his two centralcharacters. It would also be to fall into the error of supposing Le Crime deMonsieur Lange to be an entirely realistic, prosaic, even didactic, work. YetLange himself is constantly referred to as an inveterate dreamer throughoutthe film, whose flashback structure, along with die fact that Valentine andespecially Lange are exhausted and in a state of shock as the story is told,intensifies this dreamlike feeling. The framing narrative itself is extremelybrief (some seven minutes out of the film's eighty-five, most of those at thebeginning), so that when we return abrupdy to it just before die ending theeffect may well resemble that of waking from a dream, back into a reality thedream-work had veiled from us — that reality in which Lange is effectivelyon trial for his life, accounting for the sadness evoked by Sesonske.

What now needs to be called into question is the opposition between'dream' and 'reality' — and, more pertinendy, the Real in a Lacanian sense —implicit in what I have just said. Zizek's analysis in The Sublime Object of Ideologyconstructs 'fantasy as a support of reality', rather than as its converse ornegation. This means, to oversimplify, that:When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves 'it was just adream', thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening realitywe are nothing but a consciousness of this drtam. It was only in the dream that we approachedthe fantasy-framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in realityitself.30

' Slavoj Zizek, The Sublimt Objtd of Ideology (London—New York, Verso, 1989), p. 47.

296 KEITH READER

This 'mode of acting in reality itself, which is among other things adescription of the political, far from being the antithesis of fantasy is actuallydependent on it. Fantasy here bears a close relationship to that 'function ofideology [which] is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but tooffer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, realkernel'.31 That 'real kernel' is traumatic because it is at once inescapable andnot direcdy representable, or representable only through the Lacanian objetpetit a, 'the original lost object which in a way coincides with its own loss'.32

Valentine's retelling of the co-operative's life — now clearly a lost object'for her and Lange odier than through the surrogate process of narration —in its circular framing of the action of the film coincides, precisely, with itsown loss, which is the direct effect of Lange's 'mode of acting in reality itself,'through his shooting of Batala. That shooting destroys one dream — that ofUtopia, of a community without tension or contradiction — in favour ofanother — Lange's unconscious desire to be the Ari2ona Jim whoseadventures he has merely invented. It also signals the renewed eruption, lamain tendue' notwithstanding, of class struggle — a term somewhat more infavour at the time of the Popular Front than it is now, and one that Zizek,political activist as well as thinker and writer in what was first Yugoslavia,and then Slovenia, is one of the few cultural theorists to have continued touse. Lange's identification with Arizona Jim is clearly a dream, although/because it is never acknowledged as such, but unless we bear in mind thecuriously oblique relationship Zizek postulates between dream and socialreality it may be hard to see why this is also true of the eruption of classstruggle. An answer may be suggested by Zizek's assertion that 'the ultimateparadox of the notion of "class struggle" is that society is "held together" bythe very antagonism, splitting, that for ever prevents its closure in aharmonious, transparent, rational Whole'.33 That moment of closure in aWhole, cognate with the imaginary in its Lacanian sense, may appear to havearrived for the co-operative with the disappearance of Batala and the Utopianrevels that ensue. Beznard's racism — 'tied to the "pathological" fact of anation-state' if anything is — seems to have disappeared, mellowed intodrunken buffoonery; yet even this is the occasion of 'antagonism [and]splitting', evidenced by his wife's growing irritation and the bearded manwho appears at a window angrily demanding that the noise stop because hehas to get up for work in the morning. Antagonism and splitting have notbeen foreclosed or overcome, merely transposed from an (absent) ethnic toa (present) class Other. Batala's recrudescence — in the most classic sense a

31 Tbt Sublime Object of Ideology,?, A,*,.32 The Sxbhm Object cfldeokgy, p. 15 8." Th Zi$tk Reader, ed. by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford—Maiden, Blackwell,•999). P-74-

RENOIR S LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE 297

return of the repressed — is thus foreshadowed even as the merrimentreaches its height, and his shooting surely puts paid to any harmoniousclosure of the kind ironically evoked by Zizek. On this reading, the 3600 panoperates less as the agent of such a closure than as a ' "holding together"'that incorporates antagonism and splitting into itself rather than seeking todeny or transcend them. The opposition between its circular dream and theharsh linear reality of the concluding shot is thus not a simple one of 'nice'Utopia and 'nasty' Realpolitik (which is precisely what a Stalinist or evenPopular Frontist reading would give us, masochistically privileging die latter),for Utopia and Rcalpolitik are ultimately indissociable like the 'fantasy' and'reality' of which they are manifestations. Visually, indeed, the final shot canbe described as more truly 'Utopian', for Lange and Florelle as they walktowards the horizon seem bound, precisely, for no man's land or 'no place'.

This analysis has, I hope, shown that Dudley Andrew is quite right to saythat Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, sometimes compared to Duvivier's 1936 LMBelle Equipe which acts out its analogous problem by way of two alternativeendings, often 'dances through the other disturbing issues it raises'.34 That isnot so pejorative a judgement as it may appear, for if the film's politics workon the level of agit-dream rather than agitprop that is because 'politics needsits imaginary, but also needs to know, precisely, that it if imaginary'.35 Thusit is that we may feel justified, with Borges and perhaps also along with Zizek,in concluding that, as Lange crosses the border: I n relief, in humiliation, interror, he understood that he, too, was an appearance, that someone else wasdreaming him'.36

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

14 Mists ofRcptt, p. 288." Keith Reader, 'Renoir's Popular Front Films: Texts in Context', in La Vie tst a nous!Fmub Cinema

0} the Popular Front, /fjj-ifji, ed. by Ginette Vincendeau and Keith Reader (London, British FilmInstitute, 1986).36 Jorge Luis Borges, TbeAJtpb and Otbtr Stones (London, Picador, 1975), p. 42.

I should like to thank Jill Forbes, Martin CShaughncssy and Mike Witt for their helpful commentson earlier versions of this article.