La petite Lili

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).

Except for the character played by Jean-Pierre Marielle everyone involved here has to cope with a cut-and-dried characterization. Sure, there are only good actors but how do you explain that the best role seems to be the one of an aging supporting character with his views on life and mostly tired of arguing with (younger) people?

A flat movie hence, where you see the script for the characters, not the flesh. Not too boring though: there's always a little something that keeps you hoping for something to happen. Then comes the second part: 'Jumping o'er times'. Totally hopeless, with a camera that has strictly nothing to say.

At least actors did their best.

Did Chekhov actually have confidence his scenes of unresolved moments would become immortal, such that, for example, in Claude Miller's La petite Lili, The Seagull gets reprised three times or so. The transposition of the amateurism of the original play within the play to a youthful video and then to an elaborate film production is very amusing. And it work nicely to make the original Russians a genially observed group of film business people on holiday in Brittany. In the story of La petite Lili young Emilie Marcucci charms everybody she meets, as Ludivine Sagnier does the viewers of this film. She's a marvel, and the rest of the move is fine too.

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.

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.