Molière

Charming story of a time. Another Moliere, in a beautiful game of desires, ambition, errors and sentimental confusion. A play by Moliere with the author as character. Comedy and description of society, drama and piece of biographic way, mirror and childish trip,it is a "cake" with many spices. Romain Duris is seductive and brilliant, part of french science to make national history pages in small and delicate jewels. The love is cover of a nice exercise to define a culture. A bait in different nuances.A travel in the spirit of transformation age. A mask of a great play writer. Picture of a metamorphosis. A slice of cake with pieces of forest fruits.

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.

There's a period of a few months in 1644 when the French playwright Molière, then only 22, fell through the cracks of history, and Laurant Tirard's film 'Moliere' (co-written with Grégoire Vigneron) makes up a story to fill the gap. Young Moliere's little company is crippled by debts and he is trying insistently to put on tragedies with no success. One day when he's in debtor's prison, he disappears. According to the film, he has an adventure that leads him wisely to reorient his work in the direction of comedy after being urged to do so by a lovely woman with whom he has a brief affair after being hired as a sort of ghost writer for her husband. This patron has paid off Moliere's debts and brings him to his estate disguised as a tutor for a daughter. He is a pretentious and very wealthy businessman who wants the young writer to pen clever material for him to pass off as his own and thereby impress a witty young woman who's the star of a salon.

The wealthy businessman is the supple Fabrice Lucchini , his lovely wife is the beautiful Laura Morante, Moliere is a be-wigged Romain Duris, and the witty salon chick is Ludivine Sagnier. The patron's name is none other than Monsieur Jourdan--the same as Moliere's most famous creation, "The Bourgeois Gentleman." Jourdan also contains elements of Orgon and Arnolphe, two of Moliere's other memorable creations. Lucchini is at the center of the film and his character is more complex than Duris' playwright, who's more buffoonish most of the time than the bourgeois fool. Anyway, though there are suitors for Jourdan's daughter and Moliere is having an affair with Mme Jourdain, as an illustration of the author's famous characters and themes this is superficial--at best, "Moliere for Dummies" (a phrase used in one of the French reviews). The underlying assumption--though I'm not sure how seriously one should take it--is that Moliere based his characters on actual people, and had to be told by a lover what genre to work in--comedy. At the end we see Moliere and his company, thirteen years later, performing a bit of 'Tartuffe,' and the lines are directly copied from the playwright's earlier adventure chez Jourdan. If this is meant to be moving, it only seems literal and obvious.

Duris' character is occasionally witty, but too much of the movie is physical slapstick that, however well executed--Duris is adept and game--thinks it's funnier than it is. An extended scene where Moliere and M. Jourdan set to imitating horses is arresting, but more peculiar than droll. Edouard Baer, as an impoverished nobleman who exploits Jourdan, seems a bit wasted here considering that he was so amusing along with the brilliant Clovis Cornillac (and others) in Tirard's funny if ridiculous 2004 comedy ''Mensonges et trahisons. . . This is farce that stumbles too often. It knocks the dust off some pages of (nonexistent) history, but somehow it never quite clicks--or finds a style. Tirard penned the conventional sitcom-ish comedy last year with Charlotte Gainsbourg, 'Prete-moi ta main' ('How to Get Married and Stay Single''). It's been a long time since Moliere. Romain Duris continues to show versatility, but this performance steals none of the luster of his much more memorable one in Audiard's 2005 'The Beat My Heart Skipped.'

Julian Jarrold's 'Becoming Jane,' playing simultaneously in this country, treats Jane Austen with the same fundamentally naïve assumption that authors invent nothing and simply copy out people they've encountered in life. But 'Jane' differs significantly. Though Miss Austen may never have gotten into the sort of amorous mess that's central to the film, such things did happen very definitely to some of her characters, and there are some genuine emotions in 'Jane.' 'Moliere' is being overrated in this country, while 'Becoming Jane,' which has been generally dismissed, is not getting a fair shake.

This movie is a true delight for Moliere's fans.A good knowledge of his plays is useful but the screenplay is strong enough to grab someone who is not particularly interested in them.The story is essentially based on "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" (aka "the middle class gentleman" ) and "Tartuffe" with elements borrowed from "Le Misanthrope" ,"Les Femmes Savantes" ,"L'Avare " and "Les Fourberies De Scapin" .Now the lines are directly taken from the writer ,now they are written in his style .Each character represents two or three other characters:the wonderful Fabrice Lucchini is Monsieur Jourdain and Orgon,Romain Duris is Molière and Tartuffe ,Laura Morante is Elmire and Madame Jourdain and the excellent Edouard Baer ,Dorante ,Alceste and some kind of "Grand Turc" .

Agatha Christie disappeared when her husband left her and as nobody knew what she did in those days they made a movie about it in the late seventies ("Agatha" ,Michael Apted).So why not Molière?In France ,some critics such as the reliable Claude Bouliq Mercier slagged off Tirard's movie ,proving that they can be prodigious snobs themselves sometimes;of course they spoke in the name of culture,of art ,of Molière -who -was one-more-time-betrayed ,they do not have any sense of humor.

Molière meeting his famous characters before writing his plays (after all they were inspired by the society he lived in) is pure fiction,and should not be taken too seriously:hence the failure with the French intellectual audience who praises to the skies any sequence of Woody Allen's films .I remember a teacher who could captivate his class with "Le Misanthrope" .He often made us laugh .I remembered him when I was watching"Molière" ,particularly the so-called "scene des Petits Marquis " updated by Celimène/Dorimène .Thank you,Mr Tirard.

NB :should not be mistaken for Ariane Mnouchkine's eponymous work (1978)

The original idea of the movie is quite seducing : it tells us a fragment of Molière's life as if he were in a Molière's play. This fictional and fantasist biography is a sort of "what if" Molière had meet in his youth all the characters he'll use as figures to his future plays : Jourdain, Elmire, Doriante, and had also experience the comical situations he'll re-transcript later on stage : Molière pretends to be Tartufe in order to learn to act to M. Jourdain. But no mistakes here, "Molière", if you put aside the painful introduction and the final scene of the movie, isn't a reflection on art and life and their interconnection, in an "Amadeus"'s style : if it tells us Molière's life as a Molière'play, it's merely to give us a simple and shallow, but quite enjoyable comedy, far from the abyssal questions such a supposition could have arise.

There's plenty of good ideas in the movie, which underline the comical side of the original idea, but never reach its full potential. The good points are a completely fun and fantasist vision of the History, for such a concept allows a non conventional and funny vision of Molière's life. It also deals with a lot of situations and citations of Molière's plays, which are always a pleasure to hear. But the movie, even more than his lack of deep, suffers from several major defaults, that spoil a little the pleasure that the concept of the film could have offer.

The direction, for instance, is far more unoriginal and academic than the the pitch of the movie : it even sometimes looks like a movie made for TV : it's clean, but there is is no emphasis in it. The same thing goes with the script : if the idea is funny, the dialogs are sometimes a little easy and the all thing is almost always predictable : more madness could have arise from the movie. And if the actors are independently all very good, they don't really match with one another : it's like if they all were in different movies.

Romain Duris is excellent in a intense (anyway, he's always too intense) and tortured Molière, but he is hardly in a comedy : his character seems too deep in comparison to the others, for they're merely comical stereotypes from Molière's plays. Fabrice Luchini is a perfect theatrical character, taking pleasure to quote Molière's dialogs every two sentences. Laura Morante is in a quite serious marivaudage and Ludivine Sagnier and Edouard Baer are very funny, but they're in their own movie : a comical show about the XVII century. And this heterogeneity of the protagonists is really annoying in a long feature movie : you really have the impression that everyone plays his own little act, without really interfering in other's.

The movie is also a little long for what's it's worth : some scenes unnecessary last forever and some unfunny situations are longly detailed (I'm thinking about the love story of the daughter of the family : it's predictable and boring). So, at the end, all you have is a funny little french comedy, whereas it could have had the intensity and the deep of "Amadeus".

And by the way, if you like fictions based on famous writer's life, I advise you to watch "Les larmes blanches" by Grégory Rateau if you have a chance to see it. It deals with Rimbaud's youth and, in only eleven minutes, it manages to be deeper than this "Molière", and to present a much more appropriate and interesting use of famous quotations.