Film
Bard love
by David Larsen
Molière is like a Gallic Shakespeare in Love.
My French is nowhere near good enough for me to judge whether the language of Laurent Tirard’s Molière is on a par with Tom Stoppard’s rapier-witted script for Shakespeare in Love. In all other ways, Tirard’s film sustains the obvious comparison. A comedy about a young firebrand falling inappropriately in love and maturing into one of the world’s great playwrights as a result. It is intelligently conceived, superbly acted, visually expansive, and it manages to be full of cunning references to Molière’s plays without requiring the audience to be familiar with them.
Early in the film, we see Molière (Romain Duris) on stage, intoning something about destiny to a restless audience. The audience starts throwing things. Desperately, Molière kicks the tragic intensity up a notch. Lurking just beneath his expression of high dramatic seriousness is a wounded little boy look. Can’t these peasants tell they’re in the presence of art?
Two bailiffs clamber onto the stage and produce a summons for debt evasion. The crowd perks up and so does Molière. He goes into clown mode, using the hapless bailiffs as straight men. The hilarious piece of improvised street theatre that follows wins the crowd over completely, but not, alas, the bailiffs. They drag our hero rather roughly off to prison.
And by this point, he is our hero. The scene is one of those “in safe hands” moments, when any doubts you might have had about the film you’ve committed yourself to watching dissolve happily away. In the space of a few highly entertaining minutes, Tirard kicks his storyline into gear, Duris shows how deftly he can play a good actor acting badly, and we learn the main thing we need to know about the young Molière: he’s already a comic genius, but he’s afflicted by the belief that serious drama has to be tragic, a register he has no talent for at all.
The central conceit of the film is that Molière – who served time for unpaid debts in 1644, and vanished from history’s record books for several intriguing months after he was released – discovers the proper use of his gifts, thanks to the good offices of one Monsieur Jourdain, who pays his debts in exchange for acting lessons. Jourdain is helplessly in love with a high-society lady, and has decided the way to win her affections is to put on a play for her. Molière is spirited away to Jourdain’s estate, where he’s disconcerted to find that Jourdain has a wife who, unlike her husband, is no fool. Molière promptly falls for her, and things spiral into tightly plotted farce.
The story’s gearshift from burlesque to something more complex and moving comes late in the piece, but things bubble along perfectly entertainingly in the meantime. When it comes, the change of pace transforms what was already a lovely little comedy into something quite memorable. Molière is currently screening at the French Film Festival, but with any luck will go into wide release; it deserves the audience.
Goodbye Bafana is M-rated, for foul language and some not especially graphic violence. This is a problem, because for anyone old enough to have learnt the distinction between the language of intense drama and that of soap opera, the film will be at best a mixed experience.
But for children, this story of the 20-year relationship between Nelson Mandela and the prison guard set to spy on him is powerfully mythic: two men at the quiet centre of a world-shaking moral struggle, with the racist guard waking up to the fact that he admires his enemy. It helps that the actors speaking the wretched lines are Joseph Fiennes and Dennis Haysbert. Haysbert is impressively imposing as Mandela, and Fiennes, in the potentially saccharine role of the guard, manages to be convincing as an essentially decent man who badly needs waking up. Despite the rating, I took my own pre-teens to this. They sat there wide-eyed for the full two hours, totally transfixed.
MOLIÈRE, directed by Laurent Tirard.
GOODBYE BAFANA, directed by Bille August.
