The Doctor's Horrible Experiment

A companion to Renoir's other 1959 film, Picnic in the Grass, this film offers a failed solution to the well-ordered, bourgeois society (while the other film offers Renoir's preferred solution). Here, Dr. Cordelier seeks to tamp down his sexual desire in order to better reflect the bourgeois ideal. His scientific experiments to prove the soul only serve to transform him into the physical representation of his soul--a raping and killing madman. Scientific experimentation to thwart desire leads to death, the latter of which is preferable to life in the well-ordered society where repression of any desires is good. In many ways, these two 1959 films by Renoir anticipate the sexual revolution of the next couple of decades.