I watched LE TOURNOI yesterday. What a revelation! I am a bit of a Renoir fanboy and have seen all of his silents, but so far LE TOURNOI had only been available to me in the hugely truncated 9.5mm version with a running time of around 35 minutes. I had never thought much of it and believed the critics that rated it as a fairly shoddy potboiler. But now that I have seen LE TOURNOI on the Gaumont DVD in all of its glorious two hours I have discovered that there is so much more to this film. Technically it is an audacious tour de force, with an incredibly mobile camera, many close-ups and actual handheld shots. Colorize some sequences and convert them to 16:9 and LE TOURNOI could have been made yesterday. This makes for a very exciting viewing experience. Add to that the ultra-lavish interiors and costumes, hundreds of horses and the backdrop of actual Carcassonne for the location shots and LE TOURNOI is a feast for the eyes on that level, too.
Unfortunately other aspects let the film down a bit. The plot is fairly unsophisticated, with a pure maiden and a villain straight out of Victorian melodrama. Maybe it is because of this that Renoir does not seem to be overly invested in the climax, the tournament of the title. I couldn't help but feel that other directors would have made a lot more of the fighting sequences. Renoir seems to have concentrated on the psychological drama, which might have been a bit of a wasted effort here due to the lack of it in the plot. The only mention LE TOURNOI gets in Renoir's memoirs is for the contraption Renoir claims he invented to shoot a scene at a banquet. Seeing this scene properly for the first time I understood why he singled it out. Here villain Francois de Baynes has brought together his harem of high society ladies around a table ready to greet (and mortally embarrass) his new fiance. Before she arrives he enters the room and - with the help of Renoir's contraption - the camera follows him slowly making his way along the assembled ladies, putting his hands on them in various ways and thereby obviously claiming them as his possessions. It makes your flesh crawl, especially as the actresses do a very good job of conveying their squirming anguish and he of displaying his obscene enjoyment of the pain he inflicts. This scene more than compensates for the lack of outstanding acting in the rest of LE TOURNOI and it alone makes the film worth watching. Altogether quite a discovery. LE TOURNOI ought to be a shoo-in for film festivals, if only for the fact that it is strongly reminiscent of GAME OF THRONES. I was reminded of Ramsay Bolton a lot.
