Long before French filmmaker Jean Renoir entered the pantheon of the greats with The Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, he made nine silent films. Whirlpool of Fate, aka The Girl of the Water, wasn't the first, but it received a theatrical release before 1926's Nana.
He gave the leading role in the 1925 film, as in six others, to his wide-eyed wife Catherine Hessling, who had faith in his talent even when others didn't (Hessling had served as an artist's model for his father, impressionist painter Auguste Renoir). He begins with a bucolic sequence featuring a young woman and a dog on a barge, drifting down a canal past a verdant forest. Intertitles introduce Gudule, her father, and her brutish Uncle Jeff (screenwriter Pierre Lestringuez).
When her father falls into the water and drowns, it's just Gudule and Jeff, who puts the barge up for sale before she's even had a chance to mourn. He then spends her inheritance money on booze, leaving Gudule to fend for herself. Worse yet, he knocks her about when she asks for help, even after she attempts to alleviate his skull-crushing hangover, so she hits the road with her canine companion (though probably coincidental, there's a distinct Wizard of Oz quality to this turn of events).
The first person she meets, Weasel (Maurice Touzé), lives in a caravan with his pipe-smoking, tarot card-reading mother, the Bat (Henriette Moret). The travelers, identified as gypsies, are happy to take her in, especially Weasel, who drafts her as an assistant in his produce-poaching operation. He also finds her quite enchanting. Upper-class twit Justin (Pierre Champagne), a land owner's son, finds her less appealing, while intertitles position George Raynal (Harold Levingston) as the "magnificent son" of a mill-keeping family.
Gudule gets on Justin's bad side when a collision with her dog knocks him off his bicycle. Though George swoops in for rescue just as Justin is about to throttle her, the encounter sparks a series of escalating incidents that result in the destruction of the caravan, so she sleeps in a tree as her hair grows wilder and her white dress turns grey. Her fate grows even dimmer once Jeff reenters her life.
During a rainstorm, she drifts into a surrealistic dream involving Jeff, Justin, and George on a white steed. George finds her the next day, soaked and delirious, and thus begins her entrance into a happier, healthier future by way of his kindly clan. Though Whirlpool of Fate failed with audiences, according to film critic Nick Pinkerton's erudite commentary track, it's hard to see why. The dream sequence was met with a rapturous reception when screened in isolation as part of a short-film series.
The praise inspired Renoir to ditch his plans to manage an art gallery and manufacture ceramics. He had finally arrived, and there would be no stopping him from becoming a filmmaker forever famed for his deeply humanist sensibilities and refined aesthetic sense, both qualities clearly in evidence here. Recommended.