Renoir makes his world energetic and compelling through the complexity and irony with which he treats even his most cherished themes. His films do not come to a stop in the sense of the self-enclosed great work; they have a richness that eludes total schematization, a constant edge of self-awareness that never yields to either formal pomposities or fashionable fragmentation. Renoir has said that every director struggles between interior reality, the reality of the constructed world of the studio, and exterior reality, the reality of the world of nature. But his point is not the final commitment to one or the other, but the dynamics of the struggle itself…. The greatness of his films more often lies in their inconclusiveness, their openness, and their rich tentativeness than in any absolute formulation of the truths of nature or the truths of theater, the claims of the individual or the...