Molière (2007) Reviews

• Romantic and richly entertaining

  howard.schumann2007-09-02

  While New York Times film critic A.O. Scott may rail at the "fundamentally bogus and anti-literary idea that the great writers of the past wrote what they knew", there is still a pervasive longing out there to discover the connection between an author's life and his work. The audacious premise that great art reflects an author's life experience is promoted in films such as John Madden's Shakespeare in Love and now in Moliére, Laurent Tirard's speculative costume drama of the great French playwright. While the suggestion that the mystery of genius lies in a secret love affair borders on the banal, these films attempt to give us a sense of who these great artists were as people and what may have been at least one source of their inspiration. Like Shakespeare in Love, Moliére uses guesswork, imagination, and creativity to fill in the blanks when the facts are not readily available. What we do know about the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin known to the world as Moliére is scanty. In 1644 he was a 22-year old actor who spent some time in debtor's prison after his touring company went bankrupt. After that the young actor and aspiring playwright disappeared for several months before he surfaced in the provinces. It was there that he toured with his Illustre Theatre for 13 years before arriving in Paris convinced that tragedy was the only true theater. Of course, what is not known is what inspired him to take a comic turn, but Tirard allows us to imagine characters and situations that might have led to such great works as "Tartuffe" and "Le Bourgeois Gentlhomme" and 28 other plays which roast the upper classes as affected hypocrites and worse. Soulfully and convincingly performed by Romain Duris, who has been known for dramatic roles such as the pianist in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Moliére is rescued from prison by a bumbling aristocrat named Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini). Jourdain has written a one-act play that he wants to perform at the salon of the haughty widow, marquise Celimene (Ludivine Sagnier) with whom he is smitten. Paying Moliére's debts, he hires him to teach him the skills of an actor while tricking his graceful wife Elmire (Laura Morante) into believing that he is a priest named Mr. Tartuffe who has come only to counsel his daughter in matters of religion. This ruse runs into problems when Tartuffe/Moliére's falls in love with Madame Jourdain; however their relationship becomes a transforming experience for the actor/playwright when she suggests that he concentrate on writing a different kind of comedy, one that probes the emotions of a drama. Complications are plentiful as the story moves from comedy to farce, to tragedy and back again with the assistance of a scheming count named Dorante (Edouard Baer) whose goal is to marry his son Thomas (Gillian Petrovsky) to Jourdain's daughter Henriette (Fanny Valette) regardless of the fact that Henriette is in love with her music teacher Valere (Gonzague Requillart). Moliére may not fully capture the true essence of the French author but the fact that it does suggest a writer of depth, wit, and inspiration may entice the viewer to seek out the source material first hand. Granted that the film is speculation, not biography, but it is art and the payoff is a romantic and richly entertaining tribute to one of the greatest playwrights in history.

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• Closing Night at the Seattle International Film Festival

  hitchcockhill2007-06-18

  The Seattle International Film festival has saved us from a droll and boring summer movie season. With sequels galore and some atrocious originals, it was nice to catch a screening of the closing night film at the festival last night: Molière. The film wins big, and hopefully will be nominated for best French film, director and actor (Romain Duris) when the Césars roll around next spring. Molière is France's Shakespeare and his life and plays might not be familiar to most Americans. So French director Laurent Tirard decided three years ago to make a film that would bring the work and escapades of the famed writer more accessible to audiences. Tirard co-wrote the screenplay and assembled a top notch cast including Romain Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), Fabrice Luchini (Intimate Strangers), Laura Morante (Avenue Montaigne) Edouard Baer (The Story of My Life), and the always wonderful Ludivine Sagnier (Swimming Pool). The story begins with Jean-Baptists Poquelin aka Molière (Duris) frantically trying to decide if he is to do a tragedy for his next play in front of the esteemed royal family despite the fact they desperately want a comedy. The film flashes back thirteen years earlier to when Poquelin has been thrown into jail because he could not pay a debt. While in jail, Monsieur Jourdain (Luchini) seeks out Molière's theatrical talents. Molière is whisked away to the Jourdain estate in disguise where he must help Jourdain win the esteem of a desired mistress (Sagnier) while keeping this all hidden from the eyes of Mme. Jourdain (Morante). In exchange for his services Molière's debt will be paid and forgiven. Bits and pieces of the rest of story seem familiar to anyone who's read Molière's plays, as this film sets the stage that these events inspire Molière to be the comedy writer that he became. The film wins on many levels. The acting talent of Duris alone merits a viewing as well as the beautiful cinematography by Gilles Henry. The images were very colorful and beautifully framed. The magnificent locations that only France has to offer were wonderfully highlighted as well as extravagant costume design, hair and make up. The score written by Frédéric Talgorn was by far one of the best parts. His ability to weave fifteenth century musical themes into a robust, fun and energetic comedy score definitely is worth a second listening at home on a nice speaker system. Oh yeah, the film is also actually funny! There are some great scenes from the plays as well as some nice jokes toward a modern audience. Molière has everything. It is a fantastically crafted and brilliant look at one of France's most famous artists. The film may run a bit long for some, but it's hardly noticeable when juxtaposed with the brilliants visuals, fantastic acting and wonderful music and sound design. The film also has heart and leaves us with a nice message to ponder when leaving the theater. When Molière releases in your area, don't miss it. The film is also appropriate for teenagers as the sexual content is rather minor. French teachers around America rejoice at a PG-13 French film they can show to their classes! Don't wait for DVD though; see this one on a big screen.

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• Molière in Love

  Red-1252007-10-04

  Molière (2007), co-written and directed by Laurent Tirard, creatively fills a historical gap that exists in the biography of the playwright/actor Molière. Apparently, Molière was released from debtors prison, and did not rejoin his acting company for several months. The movie provides us with a fictional reconstruction of what went on during that time span. Like many period films, this movie has high production values. The sets and costumes are glorious, and we are spared the usual obligatory images of filth and squalor. Instead, most of the film takes place in the château of the very wealthy M. Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), and his dutiful--if somewhat bored--wife (Laura Morante). Ludivine Sagnier plays a wealthy young widow, the Marquise Célimène. The plot revolves around M. Jourdain's worshipful love for the Marquise. The Marquise barely knows he exists and so M. Jourdain proposes to hire Molière to teach him how to make a good impression on the object of his desires. The Marquise is self-centered, vain, and proud, and M. Jourdain is a fool. However, he is a rich fool, and can afford to go where his whims take him. Molière accepts the job, and the film moves forward from there. Romain Duris is very good as Molière. He reminds me of Johnny Depp, and, like Depp, he overplays his role in a humorous and enjoyable way . Fabrice Luchini is excellent as M. Jourdain--a man who has a wonderful wife but lusts after an unattainable and unlikeable woman. Laura Morante is outstanding as the wife, who lives with luxury but not with love. Ms. Morante is Italian, so it's not clear to me whether her voice was dubbed. In any case, she plays her role with skill and subtlety, and she has a presence that lights up the screen. This film will remind you of "Shakespeare in Love" and "Becoming Jane." It tries to correlate the artist's experiences--about which we can only speculate--with his or her art, about which we know a great deal. It is obviously unlikely that we will ever learn what led Austen or Shakespeare or Molière to write their masterpieces. Because this vacuum exists, writers and directors are free to speculate about events, and present these speculations to us in the form of movies. I enjoyed both "Shakespeare in Love" and "Becoming Jane," and I would put "Molière" into this same category--not a great film, but a very good film, and definitely worth seeing.

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• Molière in Love

  marissas752007-02-02

  A French-language review of "Molière" (accessible under IMDb's External Reviews) compares this movie to "Shakespeare in Love," and that's probably the easiest way to sum it up. Both films are comedies that make no claims to biographical accuracy. Instead, they fictionalize a period of a few months when the playwright in question was young, brooding, amorous, in need of money and constantly getting into scrapes. When this movie begins, Molière (Romain Duris) is a young actor who wants to play great tragic roles but finds that his comic mugging gets more applause. Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), a middle-aged merchant who has written a play that he hopes will impress the witty Célimène (Ludivine Sagnier), hires Molière to help him stage it. Jourdain doesn't want anyone to hear about this plan, so Molière goes to live in his house disguised as a priest named Tartuffe. There, he gets involved in a number of comic subplots. He participates in the Jourdain-Célimène intrigue, helps a pair of young lovers, falls in love with Jourdain's elegant wife Elmire (Laura Morante), and finds his voice as a writer. If you're familiar with the plays of Molière, you probably recognize many of the character names in the preceding paragraph. Jourdain is "The Bourgeois Gentleman" himself, Célimène is the heroine of "The Misanthrope," and "Tartuffe" is a comedy about a man who pretends to be a priest while he's really trying to seduce his host's wife. In other words, the movie playfully suggests that Molière didn't invent his famous characters and plots out of thin air, but stole them from experiences he'd had as a young man. This premise could leave "Molière" feeling like nothing but one big in-joke, enjoyable only if you already know a lot about the author. Fortunately, the reason Molière's works have endured is because they're universal and they're funny. You might get an extra kick out of some of the movie's dialogue if you realize it quotes a Molière play, but it's also funny dialogue in its own right. Characters such as Jourdain, the ridiculous fool who eventually gains a measure of pathos, are still familiar to us today. Luchini, Sagnier, Morante and others do a good job of incarnating their stock characters, and Duris makes a very charismatic, humorous, passionate Molière. My one complaint about "Molière" is that the prologue and epilogue, which take place 13 years after the events of the main story, don't work. The tone switches from farcical comedy to heavy drama (centered on a deathbed scene, believe it or not), and the movie makes the reductive point that everything works out happily at the end of Molière's plays because his own life didn't work out quite so neatly. In this movie, Molière finds his voice when he realizes that comedy can tell just as much about the human condition as tragedy can. And the main storyline, which is farcical but rarely too cartoonish, affirms this—until the downbeat ending, when the filmmakers lose their trust in comedy, and insist for the first time that Molière must be treated seriously. A shame that they betrayed the spirit of the movie like this, because otherwise it's an entertaining, affectionate but irreverent homage to a great playwright.

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• A more fruitful experience for those intimate with his works

  movedout2007-11-04

  Laurent Tirard's costume comedy "Molière" finds comparison with "Shakespeare in Love" rather easily, and perhaps most dauntingly, to its legendary subject's own durable narratives. But while there's not as much details missing from the 17th-century French playwright Moliere's (Romain Duris) life as there was in Shakespeare's, there's still ample room for a fanciful imagination and conjecture. The window is small, for Tirard and co-writer Grégoire Vigneron to present the missing weeks of Molière's life after his brief imprisonment for not paying his debts, just before he embarked with his troupe on a 13-year tour of the French provinces before his triumphant return to the theatre scene in Paris. The driving point in this film, as it was in "Shakespeare in Love", is how great art tends to imitate life and how muses tend to stem from elaborate romances, which in this case is Molière's torrid affair with the wealthy Monsieur Jourdain's (Fabrice Luchini) wife Elmire (an enthralling Laura Morante). Tirard's first salvo and indeed the one that sustains its premise throughout the end, is his understanding that a film about Molière has to be a farce, an important element that shapes his later and most important works when romance, gender politics and the moral bankruptcy of the French aristocracy become his staples. As a staunch tragedian, he gets an early education in the deviancy of the social class from the misguidedly smitten Jourdain who picks him out from his cell to help him perfect his self-written play to impress the blueblood snob, Célimene (Ludivine Sagnier). But "Molière", for all its charm and spirited performances does play rather loose in its opening hour, setting up the strands to be tangled in its second half. The modern transposition of the ringing hypocrisy of the rapacious upper class and eager capitalists ingratiating themselves into a privileged circle offers up its most scintillating prospects. Nonetheless, flawed in his initial insistence of tragedy as the spirit of true art, it would seem that while Molière's life is a stage, he's not yet in on the act. Duris plays his character with an insinuating intelligence, cynically wearing a scowl on his face but a twinkle of hope in his eyes, all with a precise intensity that threatens to spill over. A hard sell for a light comedy bordering on fluff, but Molière plays the crucial role of the straight man in his own farce. There's no sombre reverence to Molière and his work, though the film hints at the genesis of his later plays through overtly familiar circumstances, making it a more fruitful experience for those intimate with his works.

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