Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Toni'

On the commentary track of this superb disc, critics Phillip Lopate and Kent Jones mention that some scholars consider this 1934 film as one of the five best directed by the great Jean Renoir. They don't mention who those scholars are —it's not that kind of commentary, as we'll get to in a bit—but the idea alone compels the viewer to place this small film in the context of widely acknowledged Renoir masterpieces such as Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. As it happens, this claim for Toni is not particularly far-fetched, because the film contains, in miniature as it were (it's a tight 82 minutes), all the elements that make Renoir a great film artist: unforced empathy, sharp irony, visual poetry...and let's not forget entertainment value.

Based on true events, shot on real locations, and assistant-directed by one Luchino Visconti, the picture is often cited as a precursor to the Italian neo-realist movement. But Renoir was a one-man film movement himself, and for all the film's surface resemblance to what was to come from Visconti, Rossellini, et. al., this ultimately has, as Jones and Lopate note, a lightness that's all Renoir. Not lightness in the sense of triviality but rather lightness in the sense of grace. The story is of a doomed love between an Italian immigrant worker (the title character, played by Charles Blavette) and a flirty Spaniard (Celia Montalvan), both of whom have landed in the French town of Les Martigues. And while Toni's travails are conveyed at a brisk clip, the picture is almost more noteworthy for its beautifully observed moments—a mini-pastoral in which Toni treats his beloved's bee-sting, or a beautiful shot through a doorway as a laborer rides up the road while, in the right hand part of the frame, a kitten scampers down to earth.

The disc from the British label Eureka!/Masters of Cinema presents a very good-looking print of this once-obscure picture. An accompanying booklet collects various writings and interviews on the film. Critic and programmer Geoff Andrews contributes a brief and informative video appreciation of the picture. The commentary is described on the back cover as being by "friends & fellow critics" Lopate and Jones, which is apt; the two writers, while erudite and thoughtful as always (I should disclose that I'm friendly with the both of them), are in a casual mode here; Lopate sometimes throws questions at Jones (and/or the viewer), but in large part they convey, quite specifically, their enjoyment of the picture. It's a relatively relaxed approach to commentary that probably wouldn't work with critics who were less well-informed and assured. In any case, like the rest of the disc, it's a pleasure.