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Catherine Rouvel (born Catherine Vitale; 31 August 1939 in Marseille) is an acclaimed French actress. Her career spans from 1959 in television to 2004. She starred in Jean Renoir's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Marcel Carné's Les Assassins de l'ordre and in the 1976 Jean-Jacques Annaud film Black and White in Color.
Catherine Rouvel is a leading French actress who has appeared in films by Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné and Jacques Deray. She was born in Marseille in 1939 and trained as a dancer before joining the Institut cinématographique de Marseille.
- January 1, 1
- 1.64 m
- Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France
Catherine Rouvel est une actrice française, née le 31 août 1939 à Marseille.
Catherine Rouvel is best known on the screen for her roles in Jean Renoir's Picnic on the Grass (1959), Marcel Carné's Les assassins de l'ordre (1971), Jacques Deray's classic gangster film Borsalino (1970) and Jean-Jacques Annaud's Black and White in Color (1976).
- Plot
- Cast
- Themes
- Production
- Release
- Reception
- Legacy
- See Also
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The famous French biologist Étienne Alexis is the frontrunner in the upcoming election for the first President of Europe. He advocates mandatory artificial insemination in order to improve humanity and make it worthy of modern science. He is newly engaged to his German cousin Marie-Charlotte and has invited her to a picnic near his mansion in Prove...
Cast adapted from A Companion to Jean Renoir and the British Film Institute. 1. Paul Meurisseas Professor Étienne Alexis 2. Catherine Rouvelas Nénette 3. Fernand Sardouas Nino, Nénette's father 4. Jacqueline Morane as Titine, Nénette's elder sister 5. Jean-Pierre Granvalas Ritou, Titine's husband 6. Ingrid Nordine as Marie-Charlotte 7. Charles Blav...
Modernity and nature
The themes of Picnic on the Grass revolve around modern issues such as artificial insemination, the pharmaceutical industry and the mass media. Jean Renoir's biographer Pascal Mérigeau writes that the film "deals with disturbingly serious subjects using a farcical tone". The film historian Jean Douchet wrote that the film should be taken seriously, but describes its story as an invitation to not do so. Renoir satirizes a modernityhe does not think highly of, and uses story and tone to suggest...
Youth and experience
Renoir had spent years of his childhood and adolescence in the area where Picnic on the Grass was filmed. He had recently begun to write a book about his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, which made him reminisce about his early life. According to Mérigeau, the film sees Renoir return to the perspective he had as a young boy and adolescent, from where he confronts the troubling questions of the contemporary world. Renoir's reconnection to his younger self is paralleled in the mode of...
European integration
The historian Hugo Frey groups Picnic on the Grass with a number of French comedies that deal with a "modernist invasion". These include the films of Jacques Tati, Mr. Freedom (1968), directed by William Klein, and The Holes (1974), directed by Pierre Tchernia. Renoir's film stands out in the group because it targets the nascent European Unionrather than the United States. The vision of a European superstate was conceived as the logical continuation of the European Economic Community (EEC), c...
Development
After working in Hollywood in the 1940s, Renoir had re-established himself in European cinema following the international success of The River(1951). During the 1950s, he developed a more detached and depoliticized approach to filmmaking than before. Simultaneously, he became a more prominent celebrity in France due to television appearances and an increased appreciation for his films from the 1930s. His work became more oriented toward personal subjects. The title of Picnic on the Grass is t...
Pre-production
Catherine Rouvel—who was married to Georges Rouveyre—had her first major role in Picnic on the Grass. Renoir had met her in 1958, shortly after her 19th birthday, during a tribute to Robert J. Flaherty at the Cinémathèque Française. She had accompanied her husband Georges Rouveyre, whose friend Claude Beylie, a film critic, introduced her to Renoir. A few weeks earlier, she had enrolled at the drama school Centre d'art dramatique de la rue Blanche, and that same winter, Renoir contacted her f...
Filming and post-production
Filming took place from 6 to 30 July 1959 at Studio Francœur in Paris, and in Cagnes-sur-Mer and La Gaude in Alpes-Maritimes. Picnic on the Grass borrows visual traits from French impressionist painting, in particular that of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This is reflected in the choices of filming locations; Jean Renoir called the film "something of a homage to the olive-trees under which my father worked so much". A major location was the property Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer, which Renoir the...
Pathé released Picnic on the Grass theatrically in France on 11 November 1959. In the United Kingdom it was released by Mondial Films in April 1960 under the title Lunch on the Grass. It was released in the United States as Picnic on the Grass on 12 October 1960 by Kingsley-International Pictures. For the French home-media market, it was first rele...
Contemporary critical response
French film critics generally gave Picnic on the Grass a positive reception, characterized by respect for Renoir. They highlighted the film's connection to impressionism and described it as charming. Rouvel's face was on the cover of the December 1959 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, and the magazine called the film "the most beautiful of a month rich in masterpieces".[a] The review by Éric Rohmer stressed the technical novelty of the film, released in "the year of the 'New Wave'", which Renoir ha...
Retrospective critical response
Picnic on the Grass has received little attention from general audiences over time, but it has been embraced by individual critics. In 2006, Luc Arbona of Les Inrockuptibles called it an "extraordinary pamphlet" portraying "the peddlers of progress" who "only care about security, asepticity and uniformity".[d] Arbona called the satire "abundant and exhilirating" and the film "brilliantly prophetic", because by the time of his writing, Arbona wrote, "these progress-obsessed, these ad-agency ap...
Box office
Picnic on the Grass had 757,024 admissions in France, and was a commercial failure. Renoir addressed this in a letter to the producer Ginette Doynel a few weeks after the Paris premiere. He wrote that the failure had given him a distaste for film and television work in general; from now on, he would instead focus on his teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, his plays, and his book about his father. Picnic on the Grasslater had a significant theatrical run in the United...
Rouvel signed an unusual contract which had the practical effect of giving Renoir the power to approve all her engagements for the next three years. Renoir decided to keep her away from the film industry and only accepted offers of theater roles. He rejected roles for her in The Green Mare and a film by Gérard Oury. Rouvel returned to film acting i...
Picnic on the Grass at IMDbPicnic on the Grass at AllMovieBiography. Catherine Rouvel (born Catherine Vitale; 31 August 1939 in Marseille) is an acclaimed French actress. Her career spans from 1959 in television to 2004. Description above from the Wikipedia article Charles Denner, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Catherine Rouvel (born Catherine Vitale; 31 August 1939 in Marseille) is an acclaimed French actress. Her career spans from 1959 in television to 2004.
