Molière


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Funny, is what it was, the new French film about Molière (Molière).   There I sat, in that hoity-toity SoHo cinema, all 2007 style and sophistication, laughing aloud in a crowd at crooked courtiers and confounded courtships and the simplest of comedic routines perfected three and a half centuries ago.  I had gone in expecting the worst—travesties of cleverness that pander to the intellectual manqué; I was instead amazed and thrilled that the keen ear and deft pen of France’s great comic playwright retain their vitality out of their context and out of their time. 

Writing in the era of Louis XIV and Versailles, when absolute power was no laughing matter and tragedy was the domain of kings, Molière had an extraordinary gift: as writer, actor, director, and troupe leader, he made high art of mockery (holding the funhouse mirror up to nature, as it were) and devised the farce as rational critique, satire with a sublimated sting.  Practical partner and philosophical heir to the commedia dell’arte, with its stock characters and masked fools, Molière took the tradition a step beyond.  He grounded his silliness in palpable social realities, stripping away the conventional subterfuge just enough to give his humor some heft.  Able thus to spotlight the ridiculous within France’s ostensibly reasoned society—the bourgeois gentleman, the phony churchman, the affected high-class ladies—he poked and jabbed at the sensitive spaces with rapier wit and (usually) plausible “who me?” deniability, striking a chord that still resonates today.  But in the beginning, his success was not quite so assured: after a first failed season in Paris, a consequential bankruptcy, and a brief imprisonment, he disappeared into the provinces in the mid 1640s with his newly founded Illustre Theatre and toured there for over a decade, leaving little trace of the time for historians to gather.

Inventing details where the biographies leave blanks, director Laurence Tirard’s fanciful biopic takes us back to those crossroads, when the grandest ambition of the young Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, new to the stage name by which history would revere him, was still to make solemn and serious theater  (still assuming the latter demanded the former).  Taking a page from Shakespeare in Love, which offered up an imagined back story to one of the Bard’s master works, co-screenwriters Tirard and Grégoire Vigneron give us the Gallic equivalent: they envision the events that motivated Molière to his masterful comic turn—that revealed him as comedian in spite of himself, as the film’s alternate title (deleted from the American release) announces in homage to the dramatist’s oeuvre.  They imagine his inspiration in characters and situations he encountered on the road.

The true fiction sets in after a brief exposition when, between debtors’ prison and disappearance, Molière finds himself at liberty, his debts all paid by a wealthy man he has never met.  The benefactor is banking that the actor will come stay with him and teach him the tricks of the trade.  His aim is to win the heart of a certain marquise without letting his wife in on the game.  His plan is to tell his spouse their new guest is a man of the church.   Financially strapped, Molière goes along.  Fans of the playwright and other cognoscenti may well enjoy the references here in the names of the man (M. Jourdain), his wife (Elmire), his extramarital love interest (Celimène), and the Count in whom he places unwarranted trust (Dorante), as well as in the pseudonym that Molière gives himself in Jourdain’s service (Tartuffe), just as they may share an insider’s giggle at certain other names, circumstances, and dialogic delights, but the film does not offer these up solely as tidbits for the self-congratulatory few.  Unlike Shakespeare in Love, which counts vigorously on flattering those who best remember their Survey of Shakespeare coursework, the pleasures of Molière are not grounded in academic posturing.  The characters in the film are as independently engaging as the theatrical caricatures they are meant to preexist, and the comic situations they offer up, familiar though they may be to some, are robust enough to tickle even the willfully uninitiated.   The cast is well chosen, besides.  Even when the comedy stretches to broad, the players play their roles with unexpected elegance, allowing for a decided poignancy to filter through the farce. 

Fabrice Luchini is a brilliant Jourdain, worth the price of admission all on his own.  His movement and expressions provoke easy, hearty laughter, while his portrayal balances carefully always between mockery and meanness.  Edouard Baer is equally winning as Dorante, similarly expressive and consistently delicious in his choreographed deceits.  A hunting mishap that touches them both becomes a moment of hilarity, not for what occurs (which Tirard graciously keeps off screen), but for the camera’s focus on the multiply reactive faces of the two actors.  Even Ludivine Sagnier, as the biting Celimène, effectively admits a softer side to her sharply delivered lines, but never so much as does the put upon Mme Jourdain.  In that capacity, Laura Morante imbues her Elmire with a grace and sensuality that could serve as muse to any artist, and a sense of timing to match the rhythm of her markedly heaving breasts.   Her entanglements with the man she knows as Tartuffe pulse with nimble refinements. Some have questioned the casting of the suddenly ubiquitous Romain Duris (L’Auberge Espagnole, The Beat My Heart Skipped, Dans Paris) as that Tartuffe, but I think it works beautifully.  Wearing a long, nearly matted, cavalier wig and a failed tragic air, Duris plays the comedic genius as a soulful romantic with a quick tongue and a curious past.   Honoring Molière’s inherent duality, he moves believably between pathos and pratfall, embracing the playwright’s gift for humor as shield and weapon against the bizarreries of human interaction: seriousness made credible through the comedy.  His performance centers the piece as a thoroughly enjoyable, and surprisingly moving, film experience. 

©2007 Shari L. Rosenblum
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