Feminine Narrative and the Law in Renoir's "Le Crime de M. Lange"

Abstract

Le Crime de M. Lange's opening scenes make a subtly complicated point of narration peculiar to film: that image divides diegetic enunciation between speaking and showing, between, so to speak, who owns and who works the narration. It is a point the film makes in a variety of ways throughout its length, none more subtle than this beginning, but none more entangled than in the end. The story the film tells describes the events leading up to Amedee Lange's conscientious murder of the capitalist Batala. But that account, the narrative frame says, is the filmic parallel to the acoustic version Valentine Cardet delivers within the film2 as a plea to the workers at the Border Hotel [Cafe de la frontiere] to persuade them she and M. Lange deserve free passage across the border into Spain. What she narrates to them, the film shows to the spectator. But with the overlap there comes an extreme self-consciousness about representation. When Valentine completes her story-and the film has completed its reiteration-the workers release the couple, because, it is implied, they see in her story a representation of their struggle. But the liberation seems mixed, and in a way that may be directly linked to the image of liberation. As regards the film's explicit Marxist theme-of revolution and changethe couple in the film's last images appears to be in a final retreat from the social order and the law, and especially from the cooperative M. Lange has been so instrumental in founding. And as regards the psychoanalytic scheme the film has lent itself to-in particular, the Oedipal struggle between Batala and Langeit can seem the couple is fleeing into the space of the repressed, a space that opens, by the film's terms, into the pre-linguistic, which is where, also by the film's terms, they left Batala. The political retreat or escape, and the psychological suppression, however, come into conflict over where the couple are going: the feminine narrative, Valentine's puzzlingly mixed genre tale of Marxist cooperatives and bourgeois love, of working-class revolution indissoluble with middleclass neurosis, has underwritten the liberation. The film's last images of a crossing of borders therefore represents a crossing of purposes and of effects, and it is there that a study of the film must find its way.