Directed by:
Jean RenoirScreenplay:
Jean RenoirCinematography:
Theodor SparkuhlCast:
Michel Simon, Janie Marèse, Georges Flamant, Magdeleine Bérubet, Roger Gaillard, Jean Gehret, Alexandre Rignault, Lucien Mancini, Marcel Courmes, Max Dalban (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
Michel Simon cuts a tragic figure as an unhappily married cashier and amateur painter who becomes so smitten with a prostitute that he refuses to see the obvious: that she and her pimp boyfriend are taking advantage of him. Renoir's elegant compositions and camera movements carry this twisting narrative – a stinging commentary on class and sexual divisions – to an unforgettably ironic conclusion. Renoir films the story with flashes of spontaneous lyrical imagination, including close-ups with other characters crowding in at the edges, a conspiratorial dance scene done in one long take with daringly roughedged and hand-held camera work, a scene of shocking revelation done with the wry distance of a carefully choreographed shot through a window, and a sequence of violence that's filmed with a rare poetic delicacy that has nothing to do with fetishizing or aestheticizing that violence but, rather, quietly extracts from its horrors a prismatic range of the chaotically tangled and overstoked emotions that flow into and from it. (Viennale)
(more)Gallery (31)
USA
![Isn't Life a Bitch? - Posters](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/posters/160/793/160793649_9a2a2a.jpg)
France
![Isn't Life a Bitch? - Posters](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/posters/158/803/158803560_fb6821.jpg)
France
![Isn't Life a Bitch? - Posters](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/posters/158/803/158803561_425cf4.jpg)
France
![Isn't Life a Bitch? - Posters](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/posters/163/726/163726240_4aef00.jpg)
international, festival and other
![Isn't Life a Bitch? - Posters](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/posters/168/755/168755102_urikb1.jpg)