Charles et Lucie

I saw this movie in Auckland New Zealand around 1980 and went to the cinema to see it 3+ times - taking all my friends with me. The third time the cinema owner came to the screening to announce that with this film his cinema had finally broken even in takings. It was a huge hit with the NZ art-house audience and is still one of my all-time favourite films that changed the way I saw movies and life.

I loved the magic mixed in with the ordinariness of the lives of the two middle-aged protagonists who found a new future by taking a risk on their own abilities. Poignant and with a gentle almost ironic humour you begin to want this easily fooled couple to win the game of life as it were. Watch it.

Charles and Lucie are a fiftyish couple (apparently childless) living in the northern suburbs of Paris. Charles was an antique dealer. He went bankrupt long ago and is now reduced to sell the few remaining family possessions; he ekes out a meager living as a concierge. He dreams about winning the lottery. Lucie had some success as a chanteuse in her youth, but she is now reduced to take menial (and sometimes humiliating) jobs such as cleaning up after a lecherous old man in a wheelchair. Charles and Lucie's relation has suffered under such stress, although some of the old feelings remain.

One day they are approached by a courtly gentleman, a law clerk working for lawyer M. De La Madriguière (Spanish speakers will catch the joke). They are told they Lucie has inherited from a distant relative a vast seaside estate in the resort town of Hyères, on the Riviera not far from Marseille. There are other perks, such as a lifetime pension. They are provided with a flashy car and drive in search of the mansion. Things don't go as expected, and they are plunged in a series of episodes in and around Marseille. Some of these adventures are dark, other funny and whimsical, still others in the domain of fairy tales. Forced to live by their wits and occasionally helped by strangers, their waning relation strenghtens; love is reborn in adversity. Finally, everything falls into place via a substantial deus ex machina and the couple discovers to their surprise that their tribulations are of interest to others.

I liked this movie with some reservations. There are too many mawkish songs and the script has weak points (for one, the happening that propels the plot presupposes an out-of-this-world naiveté from Charles and Lucie) but if the movie pleads fairy tale some of these objections can be put aside.

Charles and Lucie are a married couple well past their prime, apparently childless and scraping a living as concierge and spectacularly untalented antique dealer respectively. Much to their surprise their rather dreary daily routine is interrupted by the announcement that they struck it rich. This leads to their re-evaluating their existence and their relationship in rather unexpected ways.

The director, who also co-wrote the script (and has a small part as a free wheeling fortune teller), created a melancholy comedy which contains a message of hope. The story is timeless, it is rich in symbolic content and could be derived from Greek mythology or even the Old Testament. Basically it is about "true" values and the limits of human power and will. It becomes evident here that in a story the author is, in a way, god.

Nelly Kaplan also has a very keen eye for fitting locations. Much of the movie was filmed in and around Marseille. The viewers get so see some of the less glamorous parts of the French Mediterranean coastline – but the locations are presented in a way that they become poetic and beautiful. The set design and wardrobe are also great! Charles at one time wears a sleeveless pullover with black and yellow horizontal stripes, he really looks like a fat, lazy wasp.

I think it is wonderful to watch a movie now and then in which the main protagonists are not youthful and elastic but just „normal" people who get tired from time to time. The DVD I own contains an interview with the director who says, that she regularly gets contacted by people who would like to do a remake of Charles et Lucie in the USA. If that should ever happen I hope that the leads are played by some good character actors and that the story is not abused as a star vehicle (like, for example, for Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver). That would certainly ruin the message.