Sur un air de Charleston
1927 Comedy / Sci-Fi   
 
  • Director: Jean Renoir
  • Script: Jean Renoir
  • Photo: Jean Bachelet
  • Cast: Catherine Hessling (Parisian Savage), Johnny Huggins (African Explorer), Pierre Braunberger (Angel), André Cerf (Angel), Pierre Lestringuez (Angel), Jean Renoir (Angel)
  • Country: France
  • Language: French
  • Runtime: 21 min; B&W; silent
  • Aka: Charleston; Charleston Parade
 
 
 
Summary
A black-faced space traveller arrives on Earth to find the planet in ruins after an apocalyptic disaster.  He discovers a wild young woman who lives in a shack with a monkey.  The alien is impressed when the wild woman teaches him various dances, and decides to take her away with him in his spaceship...

Review
With some material left over from his previous film, Nana , Jean Renoir decided to indulge his whim for comic fantasy in this bizarre short film which defies any attempt at rational interpretation.  The film was intended as a surreal tribute to jazz, which Renoir claimed to have just discovered when he made the film.  With a blacked-up lead character and clumsy erotic dances from a semi-nude Catherine Hessling, the film manages to push back the frontier of bad taste by several leagues, but Renoir’s humanist treatment of his subject - to say nothing of his bizarre imagination - makes the film an interesting and oddly entertaining curiosity.

© James Travers 2003


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