Janie Marèse

Listen to Janie Marèse as Lulu in La Chienne (1931): the working-class diction is pointed, the delivery direct and unsubtle. Jean Renoir asked her to speak that way, and there is little invitation to sympathise. Lulu exploits a naïve man with her pimp's help, and Marèse makes that behaviour easy enough to understand. Getting to know the woman is harder. The film is worth seeing, but we wanted more from this part of its triangle.

Her stage and opérette experience preceded sound shorts and her first features in 1930–31. Amours viennoises (1930) was among those early appearances, followed by her breakthrough in the lead of Marc Allégret's Mam’zelle Nitouche (1931). That success brought her to Renoir's attention. We should be wary of treating the earlier work as mere preparation for Lulu. She had already succeeded in a leading role before the film by which she is chiefly remembered.

In La Chienne, Michel Simon makes the cruelty recognisably human, while Georges Flamant's unforced performance as Dédé keeps the crime material from becoming a display of bad behaviour. Marèse completes the triangle without giving us the same sense of someone who exists outside it. We felt frustrated by how little we could discover about Lulu apart from the two men. That limits how much the relationships can move us, and leaves Simon's central performance having to supply more of the human interest.

The bluntness is not entirely Marèse's doing: Renoir's instruction about her diction matters when judging its effect. A director can get the delivery he wants and still leave his actress with too little to play. Her directness suits Lulu's exploitation of the man, though it does little to complicate our response to her. We would start with La Chienne for its uneasy humour and patient attention to people, with one caveat: do not take its limited interest in Lulu's inner life as the final word on Marèse.