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Toni

1935 1h 30m Drama List
100% Tomatometer 12 Reviews 89% Popcornmeter 500+ Ratings
Toni (Charles Blavette) is an Italian immigrant trying to make it in the melting pot of 1920s Provence, France. He moves in with his landlady, Marie (Jenny Helia), and gets a job as a laborer at a quarry. Any stability he has is threatened when he falls for the Spanish Josefa (Celia Montalvan), a young woman who marries the brutish quarry foreman, Albert (Max Dalban), after he rapes her. When Toni tries to save Josefa from her miserable existence, he must face the tragic consequences.

Critics Reviews

View All (12) Critics Reviews
Renata Adler New York Times It has a curious, muted, infinitely poetic way of treating human passion. Jun 6, 2012 Full Review Chicago Reader 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 Joshua Rothkopf Time Out Renoir invests it with a sense of character and place that gives it an unusually blunt and sensual impact. Jun 6, 2012 Full Review David Harris Spectrum Culture Though Toni doesn't scale the heights of Renoir's best, it is an interesting, and refreshing curio, a full-blooded melodrama of a director getting fresh air and breaking free. Apr 13, 2021 Full Review James Kendrick Q Network Film Desk Renoir gives the film an indelible sense of humanity, but its story is simply too slight to make it much more than a curious forerunner to his future masterpieces Rated: 3/4 Sep 13, 2020 Full Review Matt Brunson Film Frenzy Often overlooked in Renoir's filmography. Rated: 3/4 Sep 6, 2020 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

View All (8) audience reviews
Audience Member Wonderfully executed tragic romance from Renoir. I find that Renoir doesn't usually attain that level of transcendence that I hope for, but most of his films are very watchable (a couple of duds like The River notwithstanding). Here we have fine performances, fine cinematography, and a fine story with an engaging web of relationships. Not much to say, just a solid movie all around. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/17/23 Full Review Audience Member Old but new. Crumbs! Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/25/23 Full Review Audience Member Minor Renoir. Full of cliches, but completely engaging throughout. Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/21/23 Full Review Audience Member Lesser Renoir, which is better than most people's best. Remarkable photography and a fine story managed to elevate this above the often grating performances--definitely worth watching. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Audience Member I have a lot of mixed feelings about this film but as it is, it does display a sense of rawness that really makes cinema into a tool for everyone, it puts our ideas and perspectives into disarray in what it displays, a re-enactment, a narrative and a documentary at the same time. The plot is very all over, with certain subplots that seems to get more attention but the focus is very clear. Overall, I can see Visconti influence when watching Ossessione. Another element is the style, which is nothing, it feels like one nice ditty that takes a non noteworthy standing in the orbit of art when compared to the magnifique of Tchaikovsky or so on. It is that drab bearing that really allows us to interpret this film in its fundamental component and that is a non-judgmental study of the emotions of these people. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/31/23 Full Review Audience Member "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. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Read all reviews
Toni

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Movie Info

Synopsis Toni (Charles Blavette) is an Italian immigrant trying to make it in the melting pot of 1920s Provence, France. He moves in with his landlady, Marie (Jenny Helia), and gets a job as a laborer at a quarry. Any stability he has is threatened when he falls for the Spanish Josefa (Celia Montalvan), a young woman who marries the brutish quarry foreman, Albert (Max Dalban), after he rapes her. When Toni tries to save Josefa from her miserable existence, he must face the tragic consequences.
Director
Jean Renoir
Genre
Drama
Original Language
Canadian French
Runtime
1h 30m