La petite Lili

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.

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).

This adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull starts out promising enough with a good ensemble cast, great art direction and interesting relationships between all the characters, but then it just peters out, especially the final film-production sequence which has absolutely nothing to say. A fair film.

'La petite Lili' (= French for 'the small Lili') is constructed after a theater-play by the great Russian Anton Chekov. This film moves on slowly, yes, focusing much more on dialogs than on visuals. Allowing its public plenty of time to keep track.

Its setting connects only to well: a film-crowd at leisure, on holidays in the French countryside. In this respect there must be praise for the visuals of a film-part that never gets any praise: the introduction, cleverly putting you in the right holiday-mood.

Right thereafter comes the shock: female lead Ludivine Sagnier is shown blatantly naked. This makes a very strong visual, but not one that fits well in this film's overall setting. However, as 'La petite Lili' has just started, maybe its viewers are not yet aware of its overall setting. Whatever director Claude Miller had in mind, in hindsight one must conclude that his naked Ludivine is too much.

Having survived this out-of-tune whirlwind-start, you can sit down to watch comfortably. 'La petite Lili' provides a well-balanced story, acted out by some very good actors. Just enjoy.

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.