Forgive my French films

Fmff : summer break, now.

noreply@blogspirit.com (pierre marmiesse) — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 08:05:00 +0200

I hereby declare fmff summer break open.

God -and others, including myself- willing, fmff will return on Tuesday, September 2.

Happy silly blockbuster season.

« Madame du Barry » : the harder the fall. (5/5)

noreply@blogspirit.com (pierre marmiesse) — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 08:05:00 +0200

Though less irrevocably linked to each other than their characters’ destinies, both « Madame du Barry » and « Marie-Antoinette » are visually splendid period pieces, which brilliantly recreate life in Versailles and solve the challenges of their overlapping chronologies in similar fashion.

Both are happy films with tragic endings, which speed through or ignore the increasingly unhappy times met by their heroines, and, despite their tiles, no biographies.

Most of « Madame du Barry » takes place between 1765, when Jeanne Bécu enters Louis XV’s bedroom, and 1774, when Louis XIV dies and she is exiled from Versailles, first to a convent, then to the Louveciennes castle her royal lover had offered to her : less than a decade in a life which filled exactly five.

Most of « Marie-Antoinette » happens between the Austrian teenager’s arrival in Versailles for her wedding, in 1770, and the birth of her first son, in 1781.

Both characters later followed the same path from the king of France’s bed to the scaffold. Both were equally reviled and libelled, one as « la putain du roi » -the king’s whore-, the other as « l’Autrichienne », accused of debauchery or adultery and of bleeding the kingdom to its ruin by their extravagant expenses.

Adversity would eventually bring them together, off screen and if historians are to be trusted : after Madame du Barry helped Marie-Antoinette in a real estate transaction, some form of affection supposedly developed between them.

Nearly as soon as Louis XV dies, « Madame du Barry » takes us back to the fair in revolutionary Paris : there, the film started its story ; there, we return to hear, but not see, how it ends.

Louis XVI was beheaded in January of 1793, Marie-Antoinette in October. We are now in December, though the studio setting seems to bask in a never-ending spring. Madame du Barry is led through the fair to her date with the executioner, but we shall not see her : the camera shies away from tabloid reporting and chooses to stay with a woman and a young kid.

When we last saw her, entering disgrace, Madame du Barry was young, beautiful and defiant. This is how the film wants us to remember her, as if the happy days she lived more than made up for the last tragic one.

According to History books, Marie-Antoinette faced death with the dignity that became a queen and Madame du Barry was taken to the guillotine screaming.

According to the same History books, Madame du Barry’s heart never let out her famous desperate last line : « Encore une minute, M. Le Bourreau », « One more minute, executioner », but what can History books do against a legend ?

Not much more than Christian-Jaque’s film, which does not repeat its title character’s apocryphal call for a time-out, probably less in deference to historical accuracy than to Henri Jeanson, never one to grant the last word, particularly a memorable one, to a competitor.

« Madame du Barry » : paparazzi dreams come true. (4/5)

noreply@blogspirit.com (pierre marmiesse) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:05:00 +0200

In « Madame du Barry », politics is made of the stuff of « people » magazines, except that the « people » magazines of the times were not for the « people », but for aristocrats only and particularly the « happy few » in Versailles, who followed each minute and step of the king’s life.

Court « etiquette » looks like it was designed for a population of paparazzi and to make their life easy : each moment in the monarch’s life is accessible subject to the proper pass and even Versailles chimneys gladly assist gossipmongers in their smear-gathering efforts.

More than any Republican palace or celebrity’s life today, Versailles was transparent to eyes and ears.

Christian-Jaque’s « Madame du Barry » and Sofia Coppola’s « Marie-Antoinette » chronologies overlap each other : Arch-duchess Marie-Antoinette came to Versailles to marry Arch-locksmith Louis not yet XVI, while Madame du Barry reigned over the king’s nights.

In Sofia Coppola’s film, Madame du Barry was played by dark, ominous-looking Asa Argento.

True to History, both films portray Marie-Antoinette like a fifteen-year old teenager, who arrived in Versailles innocent of both French Court’s « etiquette » and lax moral standards ; shocked to discover that her grand father in-law had a mistress, she refused to speak one single word to her.

This was the second time in two years Martine Carol was snubbed in Versailles : in Sacha Guitry’s « Si Versailles m’était conté », she played la Duchesse de Bouillon, born Mancini, one of prime minister Mazarin’s nieces, who had groomed fabulist Jean de la Fontaine for success ; all of her scenes were later deleted and the experience was all the more humbling that the edited film ran for no less than one hundred and sixty-five minutes.

The attrition war between the two women came to an end when, under strong pressure from both her Austrian reigning grand-mother and Louis XV, Marie-Antoinette acknowledged Madame du Barry’s existence long enough to utter these words : « Il y a du monde aujourd’hui à Versailles », « There is a big crowd today in Versailles »...

One easily imagines Christian-Jaque’s and Henri Jeanson’s sardonic smiles, as they staged these words of utter banality like a climax of wit in a movie graced with so many memorable one-liners.

Marie-Antoinette’s remark reminds of Paul Valery’s derogatory comment about the art of the novel : how to take seriously a literary genre allowed to open on such a dismal sentence as « La marquise est sortie à cinq heures », « The marchioness went out at five » ?

Adding to the irony of the scene, Marie-Antoinette is played by Isabelle Pia, whose character, one year before, in « Le bon dieu sans confession » prepared to become a single mother and live in an apartment her father had initially bought -unbeknown to her- for his -platonic- lover.