Night Asylum (1936)
Nachtasyl is a 1936 French drama film directed by Jean Renoir and starring Jean Gabin . The script was based on the play of the same name (1902) by Maxim Gorki .
action
Jean Renoir moved Gorky's play in Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century to France. The night asylum is a kind of pension for failed livelihoods of all kinds, flotsam from a society that spits out its “losers” and hides them in cellar holes. Mikhail Kostilew, who likes to make a living as a fence, and his much younger wife Vasilisa have given these stranded people a small, poor shelter. There are, for example, the locksmith Andrej Kleschtsch and his seriously ill, still very young wife Anna, whom he beat half to death. There is the young prostitute Nastja, who dreams of the true love she read about in a novel called Doomed Love . Because of her romantic streak and the kitschy love stories, she is mocked by a man of high social standing, the baron, himself a deeply fallen man. This is a newcomer and until recently lived in frenzy. But then he became impoverished by "adverse circumstances" - the high-ranking civil servant and notorious gambler lost all his fortune playing cards and then reached into the state coffers in order to reorganize himself in this way. A last attempt to win everything back in the casino failed miserably. As a bankrupt, the baron was no longer able to repay the money and was suspended from his office. When he returned from the casino one night to his domicile, which had to be vacated the next day, with suicidal intentions, he met an uninvited guest named Pepel Wasska. This is an ordinary thief and lives in the eponymous night asylum, in which a new "guest" with worn clothes, the baron who has failed in every respect, finds himself. From the unusual first encounter between Pepel and the baron something like friendship grows: two thieves among themselves, albeit on a very different social level.
Another night asylum seeker is the nameless actor, an alcoholic through and through, who has fallen so deep because he lacks belief in himself. Luka, the philosopher, who listens patiently to the actor, advises him to go to one of the new drinking hospitals and get cured there so that after a cure he can start a new life. Luka also knows consolation for Anna when he tries to make it clear to her that death will free her from her suffering. Pepel Wasska, on the other hand, sees his path downward predetermined from the beginning. His father had spent half his life in prisons, and so he too had followed this inglorious example and embarked on the career of a criminal. Poor people, so his credo, could afford neither honor nor conscience, because neither would warm them nor fill their stomachs. Pepel had an affair with the quarrelsome Wassilissa, but now loves her younger and gentler sister Natascha. On the one hand, she feels drawn to Pepel, but on the other hand, despises him for his criminal behavior. Pepel, disgusted by the life in the night shelter for some time, promises her to look for an honest job. Among the inmates of the asylum, Pepel is the only one who has self-respect and energy and an income - even if it is one that is based on burglary and theft. Finally, the individual storylines come together, the love in the night asylum is at the same time opposite to death: Anna is released from her grave suffering, and the actor is such a failed existence that the drunkard, disaffected by the baron, finally chooses death and himself voluntarily hangs up. In a general scramble, the pension operator Kostilev is also killed. This circumstance gives Vasilissa, who has been booted out as a lover by Pepel, to take revenge on the thief. She claims without further ado that Pepel murdered her husband. He then wanders behind bars, and Vasilissa sets off with Kostilev's collected fortune. Natascha waits for Pepel and picks him up in front of the prison gate on the day of his release. Both say goodbye to the baron in the night asylum and begin a new life together with the aim of honesty.
Production notes
Night Asylum premiered in Paris on December 5, 1936. In Germany, the film could only be seen ten years after the war, in 1955.
The buildings were designed by Eugène Lourié , the dialogues were provided by Charles Spaak and Renoir themselves.
In 1937 the film was awarded the Prix Louis Delluc and was the first to receive the award that was founded that year.
Reviews
“ Les bas-fonds is above all a film by the actors, whom Renoir clearly focuses on here. But there are also great sequences in which these actors are suddenly only part of a milieu that is not trying to imitate 'Russian conditions' but to expose the misery. "
"'Nachtasyl' surprised Renoir's admirers, who were not used to seeing the director involved in such a wretched and depressing story."
In the lexicon of international films it says: “Jean Renoir's completely independent and yet textual and particularly milieu-faithful adaptation of Maxim Gorky's“ Nachtasyl ”(with a slightly optimistic ending compared to the original) is a significant film document of the socially critical phase of French film the III. Republic. Renoir's unconditional solidarity with the outcasts gives the film an almost "socialist" character. "
“LES BAS-FONDS (Night Asylum, F 1936), a transfer from Gorky's 'Night Asylum' to France, is also permeated by the optimism and optimism of the Popular Front. (...) The glowing solidarity in the working class, the optimistic end and Renoir's unconditional solidarity with the poor and homeless are expressions of their time. "
Web links
- Depths on Whoknows Presents. Film and context
- Depths on filmkreis.tu-darmstadt.de
- Depths in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Night asylum. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 11, 2015 .
- ↑ Nachtasyl on arsenal-berlin.de