La petite Lili

Some girls seem to be sweet and loving, as undesigning as lambs, but then they are revealed as ruthlessly ambitious, unfeeling, opportunistic, and ready to betray at the drop of a hat. Such a one is 'little Lily', the sweet local girl who is having an affair with Julien (played by Robinson Stévenin), a young lad whose mother is a French movie star (Nicole Garcia). The main action of the film is set one summer on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, very near to the megalithic ruins of Carnac (which do not appear in the film) and the Bay of Quiberon. The remainder of the story is 'four years later' in Paris. Little Lily is played by the ever-so-sweet Ludivine Sagnier. Such a gentle soul, so loving, so harmless. But aha! The film star mother has a famous film director visiting for the weekend named Brice (suavely played by Bernard Giraudeau), and Lily drops Julien in an instant, seduces Brice, and is off to Paris with him in a trice. (Brice in a trice, geddit?) Pining hopelessly after Julien is the quiet, self-effacing Jeanne-Marie, played by Julie Depardieu (daughter of the famous Russsian actor Gerard Putin). She is very good indeed in her role, with just a whiff of Chekhov about her, which is just as well, as this film is inspired by a Chekhov play called CHAYKA. She was very good in the film LES FEMMES DE L'OMBRE (aka FEMALE AGENTS, 2008, see my review) and has appeared in 70 titles, as many titles as it took men to translate the Septuagint. Ludivine Sagnier is so amazingly talented that one gasps to think of it (and one also gasps to look at her, but that is a different matter). I recently praised her brilliant acting in LOVE CRIME (CRIME D'AMOUR, 2010, see my review) and previously praised her genius in A SECRET (UN SECRET, 2007, see my review) directed by the same master director who made this film, the amazing Claude Miller (pronounced 'Millaire' because he is French). This film is really very subtle and disturbing, as well as intensely satirical. The people play out their drama, and then later they all agree to play themselves in a film in which they re-enact the very same drama four years later. Well, you can't get more ironical than that. And Little Lily begs and schemes and pleads to be allowed to play herself betraying Julien despite the fact that Julien has now become a film director and he is actually directing it. The ironies are so great that they produce enough highly-wrought iron to construct a suspension bridge of emotion, reaching all the from Brittany to Paris. Yes, Monsieur Millaire was having his little joke with his Little Lily, and God knows he may have been having his revenge too, since one readily imagines that he has known at least one, if not ten, Lilies, and perhaps he wanted to rub a few noses in the dung of betrayal, and to expose the hollow nature of fame and the falsity of cinematic illusions. The house by the sea is so marvellous one wants to move in immediately, by the way, for that section of the film was all done on location. How does one make a booking? Can you pay for a week there by buying enough cinema tickets? I do hope so, for after all, why does one watch movies anyway, if not to erase from time to time the borderline between reality and fantasy? In fact, I volunteer to enact the role of Julien anytime, at least in the initial scenes, before he gets dumped. This film really is very intriguing, and if the French only knew how to make decent tea, I would call round one afternoon to pay my respects to this house full of squabbling folk. I'm sure they are all still there coping with their emotions with more or less success.

I'm still trying to figure out what it is about the French and Classic texts. They love 'fixing' them when they ain't broke as much as they seem to love the originals. In the last five years I've seen on the Paris stage productions of 'Un Tramway nomme Desir' in which the 'flowers for the dead' reference was moved from the beginning to the end; where Blanche and Mitch not only went on a date but were SHOWN in a jazz club complete with a full-length blues performed by a Black singer (not in any production I've ever seen) and, to cap it all, the nurse who accompanies the doctor in the final scene was played by an obvious transvestite wearing drag ('she' was listed as a man in the program) who arm-wrestles Blanche to the floor. This was followed a couple of years later by 'The Glass Menagerie' which begins with a Prologue in which Tom and The Gentleman Caller perform a soft-shoe to Jack Teagarden's recording of 'I'm Confessing'. In the original play the Gentleman Caller appears only at the end but what does Tennessee Williams know. Chekhov gets the same treatment. La Petite Lili is a take on 'The Seagull' and last year I fought to get tickets for an acclaimed production starring a great French actress, Irene Jacob, as Nina. I was slightly bemused BEFORE the play started when the management appeared to play EVERY recording of 'Over The Rainbow' in existence. Then the play began - with Masha performing a raunchy version of 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' punctuated by swigs from a can of lager (neither the song nor canned beer was available in 19904). Call me square and old fashioned but I prefer the opening line that Chekhov wrote for Masha 'I'm in mourning for my life'. As if that weren't enough from time to time the proceedings ground to a halt as the ensemble broke into 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow'. But why am I telling you all this? Because now Claude Miller has put his two cents worth in, updating the story to take account of film and video technology and changing the character's names although leaving their actual roles the same. There's some nice moody photography but when the oldest character on the Lot, the superb Jean Paul Marielle, runs, not walks away with the movie something is badly wrong. All things being equal this should be Nina's movie but given that they cast the ubiquitous Ludivine Sagnier (again at the expense of the far superior Virginie Ledoyan) who is rapidly cornering the market in overripe sexy sluts (think Jennifer Jones in 'Gone to Earth', 'Duel In The Sun', etc), and clearly has her eyes on the gap left by Vanessa Paradis, this was never going to happen. If only someone would get hip that's it's not enough to look as though you go through life wearing slightly soiled underwear and are happy to flaunt your dubious charms and play sex scenes, you also have to be able to ACT, then maybe Sagnier could settle for a career in the French equivalent of the 'Carry On' series and leave the acting to Ledoyan. On the plus side this film is worth seeing if only for a handful of scenes at the end in which Marielle comes face to face on a movie set with Michel Piccoli, playing Marielle on film (don't ask). It seems that when Claude Miller is killing waterfowls he leaves no tern unstoned.

The film starts off a little awkwardly. I wasn't quite sure where it was going or if I wanted to go with it, but like all great films it slowly got under my skin. By the second half I was totally engaged and rate it right up there with my favourites.

Like Antonioni's, The Dreamers, this film captures the awkwardness and passion of being young but also offers a reflection on growing older.

This film is not for people looking for typical Hollywood fare. It a classic European film that draws you slowly into these characters lives. The film takes it's time to get where it's going, but when you get there you're glad you went along for the ride.

The most annoying thing about french movies about cinema is certainly their need for self-criticism. By doing so, they think they can hide themselves from any other criticism. It's exactly like when someone tells you - with an ironic intonation - all his major flaws, only in order to be contradict. But showing your flaws is not suppressing them.

And so it goes with Claude Miller's "La Petite Lili". This movie is a naturalist drama, where you can only watch "actors playing their parts", and who speak by "mots d'auteurs", trying to reach by them a certain "psychological truth". Furthermore, there're indeed an impression of constant semi-failure in all the scene of the movie, even in the one where a character says so. And, once again, it is not because all this is underlines by the movie itself that it's not true.

But the movie seems better than that and manage to get over all the clichés of a certain french "cinema d'auteur" -with the DV in bonus. Maybe because Proust's shadow, more than Tcheckov, seems to be everywhere in the movie. The writer is directly quote twice in the movie. The firth evocation - more of an invocation by the way - is made by Brice, the conventional director, who, in order to seduce the "jeune fille en fleur" Lili, quotes "Les plaisirs et les jours", where he found "something beautiful about the desire's angst". This sentence, of course, perfectly fits with the preoccupation of Lili, tortured double of Anne Baxter in Mankiewiictz's "All about Eve". Later on, Simon - the great Jean-Pierre Marielle - looking for something to argue with his doctor he can't stand, says to him that his illness comes from intelligence, and therefore, he needs an intelligent doctor to cure him. This sentence is a reminiscence of what's Marcel told to the Doctor Cottar in "In search of lost time". Of course, for it's hard to establish one and only direction for the movie, you can reproach to Miller to use as many cultural references as possible - Tchekhov, Proust, Mankiewicz - in order to satisfied his intellectual spectators. However, the Proust's way goes beyond Lili's "Desire's angst", and of all the characters, and gives birth to strange scenes in the second part of the movie, where the events of the first one, like in Proust's, are lived a second time by memory and artistic creation. It even reminds me of Eustache and the shooting of "La Maman et la putain".Everyone tries to transcend his own flaws, his pitiful routine, his ridiculous past and present to transform them in artistic energy - and especially Lili.

Meanwhile, Simon meets Michel Piccoli, his fictional double - another proustian theme - and strangely walks in a foreign and familiarly stage, the artistic copy of his holiday's house. You can then interprets the movie as an old man's dream, the search of lost time of a man who never lives anything, but who sees himself as an artist through his son. Because it's also in their memories that the characters walks in this second part. They live their life once again, but changed by art, which makes them unrecognizable, and certainly more true than the little family drama they lived four years ago. The movie becomes really good in this repetition, which almost belong to the fantastic, because, as in Proust's, art gives birth to a memory which is more real than art, and life becomes then its own ghost.

This story is derived from a story by Chekov (not the Star Trek one, by the way) and the movie was very, very, very "talky". And while the quality of the film's production is there (this is why it earns a 5--for acting, direction and cinematography that are just fine), the story itself just seemed dull and lethargic. Plus, I found I really didn't like anyone--the title character seemed like a direction-less nymph, her boyfriend an insufferable "artist" who just needed to grow up, and the rest of the family just seemed like a bunch of phonies I felt no connection to in any way. And everyone just seemed to talk and talk and argue and then talk again! About the only thing going for this film to lift if above mediocrity is the very nude body of the title character in the first minutes of the film--this was tough not to notice (and this makes this movie inappropriate for kids, as well).