French Cancan

French Cancan (also known as Only the French Can) is a 1955 French-Italian musical film written and directed by Jean Renoir and starring Jean Gabin, Francoise Arnoul, and María Félix. It marked Renoir's return to France and to French cinema after an exile that began in 1940.

Where Renoir's previous film, The Golden Coach (1952), had celebrated the 18th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, this work is a homage to the Parisian café-concert of the 19th century, with its popular singers and dancers. Visually, the film evokes the paintings of Edgar Degas and the Impressionists, including Renoir's own father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Plot
In Paris in the late 1880s, Henri Danglard owns a fashionable, but not very profitable, night club called Le Paravent Chinois, where the main attraction is a solo belly dance by his mistress Lola. One night, he accompanies a group of friends to La Reine Blanche, a simple dance hall in Montmartre, where he sees people doing the old-fashioned, but high-energy, cancan. Struck by the suppleness and charm of a young laundress named Nini, he persuades her to take dancing lessons for a new show he is planning. He sells Le Paravent Chinois and, with additional funds from Baron Walter, a banker who is infatuated with Lola, buys and tears down La Reine Blanche, intending to replace it with a new venue—the Moulin Rouge—at which a troupe of glamorous girls will perform the cancan.

Tryouts, rehearsals, and demolition progress fairly smoothly, until Danglard is injured at the construction site in a fight with Paulo, Nini's jealous boyfriend. Danglard falls behind on his payments while he recuperates, and Lola, who is jealous of Danglard's growing relationship with Nini, arranges to buy his property out from under him. She offers to give control back to him if he drops Nini and the cancan, but he refuses. Fortunately for Danglard, Alexandre, a timid, wealthy prince, falls in love with Nini and, although she barely knows him and does not reciprocate his feelings, buys the property from Lola and gives it back to Danglard.

Construction of the Moulin Rouge proceeds, and preparations get underway for opening night. Danglard begins to shift his focus from Nini to his newest discovery, Esther Georges, a maid who he is turning into a singer. Lola tells Alexandre that Nini's relationship with Danglard is more than professional, and, when this is confirmed, the prince shoots himself. Lola feels terrible and apologizes to everyone. Alexandre recovers, and Nini agrees to go out on the town with him for one night, after which he returns to his home country alone.

On opening night, the house is packed and the audience is rapturous. Seeing Danglard kiss Esther after her song and follow her into her dressing room, Nini declares that she will not perform in the climactic cancan unless she can have Danglard all to herself. He responds that she can have a fabulous life with Alexandre or a conventional one with Paulo, but she will not be happy with him because he does not care for anything except the shows and performers that he is creating, and those change all the time. Everyone rushes off, ready to try performing with the unrehearsed Lola in Nini's place, but Nini decides to dance after all.

Danglard stays backstage alone and listens nervously to how his new cancan is received. Once he knows his new venture is a success, he joins the euphoric audience and hears a woman singing along behind him. He asks if she wants to go on the stage, and she says she does.

Production
The film was shot at the Joinville Studios in Paris. The sets were designed by the art director Max Douy.

Critical reception
In a review in Arts magazine in May 1955, François Truffaut called the film a milestone in the history of colour of cinema, saying: "Every scene is a cartoon in movement [...] Madame Guibole's dance class reminds us of a Degas sketch." While he did not consider it as important a film as Rules of the Game (1939) or The Golden Coach (1952), Truffaut nevertheless said it showed that Renoir was "as vigorous and youthful as ever." Writing in Positif, Bernard Chardère did not receive the film so positively, however, criticising the music, the sets, and even the final cancan scene. He wrote: "The phoniness of the Rue Lepic, with its vegetable carts and piles of artificial stones is painful to look at. The actors act. The audience gets bored. The dance rehearsals are Degas all right, but the kind that appears on Post Office calendars."

The film received the Grand Prix de l'Academie du Cinéma in 1956. Roger Ebert added French Cancan to his "Great Movies" list in 2012.