Renoir's receptivity to the French Left and active involvement with it played a critical role in shaping his artistic vision at a time when he was consciously evolving his own cinematic language…. Le Crime de M. Lange (1935) and La Marseillaise (1937) can both be seen as major artistic expressions of Popular Front consciousness. (p. 36)

In Toni we are dealing exclusively with a rural milieu, characterised by its initial appearance of openness, with an emphasis on exteriors captured in long shots with a wide angle lens. But in Toni we find a nature that is pressing in, confining, like the massive rock surfaces of the quarry which dwarf the workers and threaten to crush them. The narrative is centred on the fatalistic ebb and flow of passion and overt social comment is oblique, occurring as a sort of parenthesis round the film, with the migrant workers returning year after year...