Like all artists, filmmakers search for realism in the sense that they search for their own reality, and they are generally tormented by the chasm between their aspirations and what they have actually produced, between life as they feel it and what they have managed to reproduce of it.

Jean Renoir does not film situations but rather -- I ask you to remember the circus attraction of the Hall of Mirrors -- characters who are trying to find their way out of the Hall, bumping into the mirrors of reality. Renoir does not film ideas, but men and women who have ideas, and he does not invite us to adopt these ideas or to sort them out no matter how quaint or illusory they may be, but simply to respect them.