Tous les matins du monde

'Tous les matins du monde' is more an experience than a movie. The brainchild of director Alain Corneau, writer Pascal Quignard, and musician Jordi Savall this film integrates the visual with the historicodramatic and the music that created the idea and bathes it in the most sensuously beautiful cinematography of a period (the 17th century) by Yves Angelo who is given the sets and design and costumes by Bernard Vézat and Corinne Jorry that create image after image of masterful still life. The total integration of the work of these masters is the plinth on which the actors offer the memory of two famous composers in French classical music history.

Saint-Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is a viol player and composer whose wife (Caroline Sihol) dies young leaving him to raise his two daughters young Madeleine (Violaine Lacroix) and young Toinette (Nadège Teron)whom he teaches his art of viol de gamba performance while sequestering himself and his girls in the countryside. Into their garden comes the young handsome son of a shoemaker, Marin Marais (Guillaume Depardieu, the son of Gerard Depardieu) who commits to learning the viol and eventually becomes a court musician only to fall in love with Saint-Colombe's elder daughter Madeleine (Anne Brochet) whom he eventually leaves for the glories of the court. As an adult (Gérard Depardieu pere) he realizes his error and returns to the Saint-Colombe sanctuary where he learns the true meaning of music as being something beyond words and thus something beyond human.

In the course of this quiet little film and in the dramatic lighting of the production design we hear the music of Couperin, Lully, as well as compositions by Marais and Saint-Colombe. Jordi Savall supplies the incidental music that binds these works and offers the viol playing together with a talented group of musicians. The story is small, the dialogue sparse (primarily Depardieu pere narrating his experience as Marais) and for the novice the film could be slow. But the incandescent beauty both visually and aurally make this film a work of art that has not been equaled since its appearance on the scene in 1991. It is a treasure. Highly recommended. Grady Harp

It's as futile to lump 'Amadeus', 'My Brother Vincent', 'Immortal Beloved', and 'Tous les matins du monde' together as it is to indiscriminately group all films about crime or all sci-fi flicks. So with pretentious generalizations on "art films" out of the way, I'd like to point out that 'Tous les matins' masters the art of pacing in a film. The story unravels in a process like the blooming of a flower -- consistent, organic, and fascinating, albeit a shade slow.

Secondly, any renaissance/baroque music fans should see this film merely for its delightful scoring. Though early European music may be an acquired taste, "Tous les matins" presents the viola de gamba in all its expressive glory, foreshadowing works like Bach's well-known cello suites. If the quasi-deep attempts to address the definition of music bother you (as they occasionally bothered me), the complementation of the music and the film's pacing will captivate you nonetheless.

And offhand, fans of Julian Sands (especially in 'Impromptu')will get a kick out of comparing him to Guillaume Depardieu as the young Marin Marais...;)

Les Matins is a film for those who have lived enough of life to know that it is a complex mix of pain and joy, with much of it pain, but much of that pain resulting from the greatest of lost joy. Pain that could even eventually give a form of joy again, if it is introspective and searching enough to move one to realize that devastating pain is merely the other side of ecstatic joy. Interrelated, indivisible, and necessary to each other for the severe lessons they teach us as a result of the strength of their inseparable unity.

This primary point was driven home time after time in Les Matins to the point where even the most abject hardheart would soon feel the story's full impact, that the shallow and mediocre fluff of life, no matter how rich, no matter how acclaimed, cannot provide an offset to the bitter agony of lost perfect love, sublime adoration that is well understood in this particular case never to come again to Sainte-Columbe and would surely be less welcome to him in his suffering than would tortured death, no matter how sweet that new love might be to another person less soul-stricken. As the story formed fully, it was seen that death would eventually be a comfort to him by finally joining him with his adored lost love and thereby ceasing his intense worldly torture. His would be a death that ended our collective hope in the discovery of more elegiac beauty in any future music he could have written, but it served to force us to appreciate more fully the few soulful and heart rending pieces he painfully but adoringly accomplished while writing at his personal creative zenith, his apogee in, and as a result of, paramount human suffering. This is a common theme told in many stories through the years, yes, but it is as real and stunning in this film as was ever done in any medium.

Les Matins is the best film story of an artist I have ever seen due to the honesty in which it understands and conveys to the audience the inescapable agony felt by a fatally tortured, artistic genius, and how that agony moved him to write his greatest music.

Normally I don't listen to classical music. I'm a fan of rock and pop music, which in my opinion is not that bizarre for a 27 year old man, but even though I don't know much about classical music, I can almost always enjoy it when it is used in a movie. The same here. In my opinion, the music may well be the best reason why I want to give this movie another try. I would even say that everybody should watch this movie at least twice. First you should go for the entire movie, so you know the story, and the second time you should close your eyes and turn up the volume in order to fully enjoy the fragile, but oh so beautiful music. I truly wish I knew more about classical music, in order to understand it better. Now I'm only an amateur who can judge in terms of 'I hated it' or 'I loved it', but who isn't able to say much more about it. Still, the movie has more to offer than just the music, the story and the acting are nice as well and that's something I know more to tell about.

This movie starts with an old Marin Marais who is listening to his orchestra that is rehearsing a composition by Monsieur de Sainte Colombe at the royal court in Versailles. But they don't play it the way it should be played and Marin Marais takes a viola da gamba to show them how it should be done. When he starts playing, all his memories about his time with the family de Sainte Colombe return and he starts telling everything: How he first met his master at the age of seventeen, how he fell in love with one of his daughters, how he became appointed to the court of Louis XIV, but never was seen as a real musician by his master... He also tells them that Monsieur de Sainte Colombe had a special way of working and that his music had a special reason of existence for the man. When his wife died and he wasn't home because of his work, the man got overwhelmed by grieve and a severe depression. From that moment on he dedicated his life to music and his two young daughters Madeleine and Toinette, avoiding the outside world and locking himself up in a small wooden shed. It was soon known what a good musician he was, even at the court of Louis XIV, where he was offered a job in the king's orchestra. But he refused because his music wasn't intended for people who didn't understand the real meaning of it: remembering his beloved wife who died too soon.

Despite the fact that in my opinion the Baroque period is probably the worst period in history when it comes to clothing and architecture - it's all much too pompous and over the top to my taste - I must say that it didn't bother me all that much in this movie. The main reason for that is because it wasn't constantly shown. Take for instance Monsieur de Sainte Colombe. Even though he lived in this time period, he didn't wear any of those costumes, but preferred to keep wearing his old and much soberer clothes. The same for his daughters, they never wear those extra large ball gowns, but have quite simple dresses. The only person that wore those clothes was the adult Marin Marais, and he only appears in the last part of the movie. But don't worry, that's about the only bad comment that I have about this movie. The acting and the story are certainly very good and make this movie worth watching. But as I said earlier in this review, nothing could be compared to the wonderful music.

In the end I can only say that everything that I saw, worked. It all looked good and I really don't understand why this movie isn't known by more voters on this website (only 971 at this moment). I believe that the fact that it hasn't been released on DVD yet, can be a reason for that 'problem', but don't let that be a reason not to watch it. When you get the chance to see it on VHS or on television, I certainly should give it a try. I really liked it and I give this movie a 7.5/10.

'Tous les matins du monde' opens with remarkable, yet quiet and simple audacity. For ten minutes, over the credits and beyond, the camera holds on the pained face of Gerard Depardieu. This shot, about as minimalist as you can get, manages to suggest so much: the actual scene itself (Depardieu as Marais giving a music lesson in Royal Chambers to a number of inept students), his own life and sense of failure, aging, dissipation of talent and emotional paralysis despite the signs of status and wealth, the intimations of a past and a place so alien to the modern and showy Court as to be on a different plane of time and space altogether. It is brilliant cinema, while seeming not very cinematic at all.

'Matins' combines two genres I generally find loathsome and redundant, and yet it is very nearly a masterpiece. First of all, it is a biopic; not really of Marais at all, but his one time teacher, Sainte-Colombe, solitary genius of the viol, and possibly the first Romantic artist, someone who composed not for Royalty or riches, but fore himself, from his own soul, alone. The problem with biopics is that they try to cram a whole life into two hours. This clearly doesn't fit, and so only the most superficial precis is possible, with a string of 'key' moments of formative psychological importance. The end result is something like those brief synopses of authors' lives you get at the beginning of books.

Corneau avoids this trap in a number of ways. There is the general atmosphere of fairy tale - the king and his courtiers; the 'cruel' father and the children he locks up in cellars; the abandoned lover and her jealous sister; the fairy-tale location, with its picturesque fragments of classical splendour, and moonlit tarns; the ghost story intrusion of revenants; the mysterious stranger who overturns the family's lives. This extends to the light, the mysterious blue glow that leaves the narrative in a twilight suspension. Depardieu's narration has the unadorned, measured simplicity of fairy tales, and the unmarked accumulation of events gives a timeless feel, one seperate from the historically verifiable Court.

Further, the film doesn't try to cram in the whole of Sainte-Colombe's life. The couple of decades it does deal with are marked by seeming repetiton and monotony. When he claims at one point to have an exciting emotional and imaginary life, his interlocutors are shocked, because they can only see the historical, physical, dour image, not the magic of a mind that converses with the dead, or outpours the most ascetically mournful music. There are key events, but these are domestic and personal (eg the death of his wife) that slowly shape his personality and the events of the film, not jarring 'Eureka!'-like moments. It is up to us to interpret the patterns, the reality behind the plain image, the unmovingly stern face, the routine events.

By the climax, the film stops being a biopic or historical reacreation, and becomes a heightened, spiritual embodiment of ideas about music, family, tradition. This is not to say the film is vague and ahistorical. It is very good about the marginalisation of equally talented women in this world of obsessive male art, where the only useful female is a dead one; and the brief, comical treatment of arbitrary monarchy is as pointed as anything in 'Ridicule'.

The other genre the film belongs to is the dreaded costume drama, that puffed up fashion parade of bourgeois aspiration, where the allusion to people who used their brains is enough to satisfy audiences who refuse to use theirs; where cufflinks and frills are creamily fetishised, and everything else - plot, character, ideas, subtext - is a mere mannequin. If the average costume drama is marked by bustle and excess, Corneau's film is private and austere. The only lavish costumes are made the object of ridicule - Sainte-Colombe, dressed in black and ruff like Monteverdi, and his daughters, live in sober surroundings, and dress very modestly. The usual period props - big homes, lavish halls, etc. - are stripped bare, become almost cell-like, unmarked by human residue.

This extends to the shooting style. The camera very rarely moves, framing the 'action' like a painting or a tableau vivant - the film's fertile theatricality extends to hearing feet thudding on the boards. This seeming visual parsimony is not too austere - unlike the films of Ozu, say, the static picture is broken up by regular editing which makes viewing less taxing. Corneau has learned a lesson about period dramas from Stanley Kubrick, director of the greatest period film, 'Barry Lyndon'. It's useless getting hstorical facts right and swamping the plot with detail - the heart and soul of any society is in its culture, and so Corneau, by recreating or alluding to famous paintings, music etc. gets closer to the truth of his characters. And the lighting...!