Toni

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Movie Info

After completing his successful Madame Bovary (34), director Jean Renoir could have had the pick of France's top "name" actors for his 1935 film Toni, but chose instead to use nonprofessionals. The plot was based on a true story, brought to Renoir's attention by the sheriff of the village where it occurred. The story is the basic "good man destroyed by bad woman" conceit: An Italian laborer sets the gears in motion for Zola-esque tragedy by falling in love with a young woman, who then marries his foreman. This terse triangle is given verisimilitude by the unknown players and the location filming at the actual village where the real-life incident took place; what could have been relentlessly grim material is imbued with warmth and sentiment by Renoir. Taken for granted upon its initial release, Toni was obviously a major influence in the Italian Neorealist movement of the 1940s; the Renoir film finally and permanently secured classic status in the auteur-conscious 1960s. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Rating:

NR
Genre:

Drama
Directed By:

Jean Renoir
Written By:

Jean Renoir, Jacques Levert
In Theaters:

Jan 1, 1934 wide
Runtime:

90 minutes

Cast

Charles Blavette
as Antonio "Toni" Canova

Celia Montalván
as Josepha

Edouard Delmont
as Fernand

Max Dalban
as Albert

Jenny Hélia
as Marie

Andrex
as Gaby

Paul Bozzi
as Jacques Bozzi the Guitarist

Andre Kovachevitch
as Sebastian

Jacques Leveil
as Jacques Mortier

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Critic Reviews for Toni

All Critics (7) | Top Critics (4)

It has a curious, muted, infinitely poetic way of treating human passion.

Jun 6, 2012 | Full Review…

Renata Adler
New York Times
Top Critic
Even these lapses often serve the positive function of bringing us closer to the people in the film, if not the characters. What one ultimately carries away from Toni, in fact, is a memory of felt presences rather than incarnations

Jun 6, 2012 | Full Review…

Chicago Reader
Top Critic
Renoir invests it with a sense of character and place that gives it an unusually blunt and sensual impact.

Jun 6, 2012 | Full Review…

Joshua Rothkopf
Time Out
Top Critic
Some of Renoir's staging, faithful to the characters' willfulness, is abrupt, with a casual lyricism caught on the fly.

Jun 6, 2012

David Denby
New Yorker
Top Critic
But even in its truncated incompletion Toni is a curious gem worthy of rediscovery both for its own artistic merits and its influence on a generation of filmmakers.

Dec 28, 2018 | Rating: 6/10 | Full Review…

Nathanael Hood
The Retro Set
Each sequence of the film is a tour-de-force of imagination: Renoir continues his investigations of depth of field and the moving camera and makes painterly use of the natural landscapes to counterpoint the drama.

Jun 6, 2012 | Full Review…

Senses of Cinema
A seminal film from Renoir, with powerful themes and a direct, immediate style.

Jun 6, 2012 | Full Review…

Film4 Staff
Film4

View All Critic Reviews (7)

Audience Reviews for Toni

Nov 07, 2007

"toni" is jean renoir's pioneering stimulus to italian neo-realism under the aroma of picturesque backwater surrounded with the rural pastures, the barren cliff and placid vineyards that weave a backset of astrayed affairs in a noirish mode with the trampy femme fatale and his willing romantic sap as the sacrificial lamb. the story is about the italian immigrant toni who is transported to french countryside to earn his honest living...and toni gets tangled up with two females, one is his virtuously generous landlady marie, the other is the lecherous josefa who literarily sleeps with every possible man she could seduce. futilely toni crazes for virtueless josefa but heartbroken by her infidelity so he ends up marrying marie but still carries a torch for josefa. eventually toni becomes the sucker utilized and doublecrossed by josefa and her ruthless cuckold. the social satire aspect is the whirling round of italian immigrants, after toni's ill-fated closure, there're yet another bunch of naive foreign immigrants departing from the train with their naive dreams in this desolate field. to be faithful to the consistancy of neo-realism, the music score of toni is accompanied completely by immediate guitar -playing by the background, and every character looks as crudely primitive as possible to create an atmosphere of wasteland, and contrarily this arrangement feels offbeatly poetic in an artlessly natrual way just like an endearing folk song with contagious affinity.

Veronique K Super Reviewer