DURIS AS MOLIERE Molière and JaneLaurant Tirard. Molière.
Julian Jarrold. Becoming Jane. There's a period of a few months in 1644 when the French playwright Molière, then only 22, fell through the cracks of history, and Laurant Tirard's film
Molière (co-written with Grégoire Vigneron) makes up a story to fill the gap. Young Molière's little company is crippled by debts and he is trying insistently to put on tragedies with no success. One day when he's in debtor's prison, he disappears. According to the film, he has an adventure that leads him wisely to reorient his work in the direction of comedy after being urged to do so by a lovely woman with whom he has a brief affair after being hired as a sort of ghost writer for her husband. This patron has paid off Molière's debts and brings him to his estate disguised as a tutor for a daughter. He is a pretentious and very wealthy businessman who wants the young writer to pen clever material for him to pass off as his own and thereby impress a witty young woman who's the star of a salon.
The wealthy businessman is Fabrice Lucchini, his lovely wife is Laura Morante, Molière is Romain Duris, and the witty salon chick is Ludivine Sagnier. The patron's name is none other than Monsieur Jourdan--the same as Molière's most famous creation, "The Bourgeois Gentleman." Jourdan also contains elements of Orgon and Arnolphe, two of Molière's other memorable personages. Lucchini is at the center of the film and his character is more complex than Duris' playwright, who's more buffoonish most of the time than the bourgeois fool. Anyway, though there are suitors for Jourdan's daughter and Molière is having an affair with Mme Jourdain, as an illustration of the author's famous characters and themes this is superficial--at best, "Molière for Dummies." The underlying assumption--though I'm not sure how seriously one is meant to take it--is that Molière based his characters on actual people, and had to be told by a lover what genre to work in--comedy. At the end we see Molière and his company, thirteen years later, performing a bit of
Tartuffe, and the lines are directly copied from the playwright's earlier adventure chez Jourdan.
Duris' character is occasionally witty, but too much of the movie is physical slapstick that, however well executed--Duris is adept and game--thinks it's funnier than it is. An extended scene where Molière and M. Jourdan set to imitating horses is arresting, but more peculiar than droll. Edouard Baer, as an impoverished nobleman who exploits Jourdan, seems a bit wasted here considering that he was so amusing along with the brilliant Clovis Cornillac (and others) in Tirard's funny if ridiculous 2004 comedy
Mensonges et trahisons. . . This is farce that stumbles too often. It knocks the dust off some pages of (nonexistent) history, but somehow it never quite clicks--or finds a style. Tirard penned the conventional sitcom-ish comedy last year with Charlotte Gainsbourg,
Prete-moi ta main (
How to Get Married and Stay Single). It's been a long time since Molière. Romain Duris continues to show versatility, but this performance steals none of the luster of his much more memorable one in Audiard's 2005
The Beat My Heart Skipped. Julian Jarrold's
Becoming Jane treats Jane Austen with the same fundamentally naïve assumption that authors invent nothing but simply copy out people they've encountered in life; again we're told that an author's best work is full of real-life characters, so half the fun of the movie is identifying people who correspond more or less to Mr. Darcy, Lady Catherine de Bourg, Mrs. Bennet from
Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Elton from
Emma, and so on. Again as in
Molière, a young writer is involved in a romance--but this time that crowd-pleasing device seems a bit more apropos, perhaps indeed a whole lot more, since obviously courtship, and the issue of love vs. money, are so central to Jane Austen's novels that to see Jane, who never married, involved in a troubled love affair early on herself is an interesting idea. Besides which, Jane Austen's novels have so often been put on film even quite recently that this fits naturally into the context.
A French reviewer called
Molière "Our
Shakespeare in Love." Well, maybe, if you think it's as good a movie. The same comparison has been made with
Becoming Jane, which seems not to have met with a stunning critical reception. Perhaps viewers and critics are exhausted after dozens of screen and television adaptations of Miss Austen's novels. Yet
Becoming Jane is fascinating in various ways, and is well served by a fine cast beginning with Anne Hathaway, whom we last saw as Meryl Streep's dogsbody in T
he Devil Wears Prada. Who would have known she had the poise and restraint (and command of an English accent) to make a convincing Jane Austen? But she does. And as her attractive, dangerous suitor-in-spite-of-himself Mr. Lafroy, James McAvoy is very winning. James Cromwell is good as Jane's father, and Maggie Smith is formidable as an elderly lady of wealth and position who's extremely disapproving of Jane's unwillingness to marry her enamored but unprepossessing nephew and heir. Into Jane's provincial world comes Lafroy, a young Irish lawyer entirely dependent on a wealthy barrister relative.
A blogger named Elisha has this to
say about the film: "Went and saw Becoming Jane last night.. really liked it, even if in parts I was like..."they so would not have behaved like that" [toothy grinning smiley]. The guy (think it was James McAvoy) that played Mr Lafroy was so Hot!!!!"
And EdwardianGirl89 continued, "I liked the way they separated though! And I was soo aprehensive about AH but from the first 30 seconds I was like THIS is Jane. She was great!"
It is highly unlikely that the real Jane Austen would have gotten into a romantic adventure like the Jane of this movie. But there really was a Mr. Lafroy. And when the two of them are at the second ball, its
soo right that they're involved in articulate, witty conversation the whole time--till they kiss!
The reason why this seems ultimately more worth caring about than Tirard's
Molière is that there are real emotions in it, and if Austen didn't get into a mess like this, some of her characters most certainly did. Nobody has to tell Jane Austen what kind of novels to write. She knows. The film cleverly saves Mr. Lafroy from being a cad or an idiot even though things, well…..better not to reveal the way it turns out.
If this business about how writers come into being and find their material is rather simplistic and absurd in both movies,
Becoming Jane is smarter and more emotionally true. It does go so far as to show Miss Austen visiting Mrs. Radcliffe, the wildly successful Gothic novelist, and learning that her life had nothing to do with what happened in her books. Apparently that is a truth
not universally acknowledged—and hence fun to play around with.
Molière is being overrated in this country, while
Becoming Jane, which has been generally dismissed, is not getting a fair shake.
Molière, 120 mins., opened in Belgium and France 31 Jan. 2007; AlloCiné press rating a meager 3.0. US theatrical release 27 Jul. 2007, Metacritic rating a meager 59%.
Becoming Jane, 120 mins., debuted in Australia and the UK Mar. 2007. Peter Bradshaw gave it 2 out of five stars in the
Guardian. US limited release 3 Aug. 2007. Metacritic rating 55%, AlloCiné a terrible 2.7. So the two films were not so far apart in the eyes of critics as I may have implied.
HATHAWAY AS AUSTEN
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