As Aventuras de Molière

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.

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.

'Molière' is a treat for the eyes as well as a tickler for historical manipulation and in the hands of writers Laurent Tirard and Grégoire Vigneron the cinematic version of the 'lost years' of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin AKA Molière's life abounds in superb entertainment. If the story becomes a bit too convoluted at times, trying to paste together a story that parallels the French playwright's most famous plays, 'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' and 'Tartuffe' as the basis for the missing portion of Molière's life, and drags on a bit too long at two hours, it is never less that gorgeous to look at and witty to hear.

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin or Molière (Romain Duris) is an actor and playwright for a comedy troupe that tours the provinces of France, spending himself into debtor's prison. His mysterious disappearance from prison is the time this film uses to explain how Molière was enticed by the wealthy M. Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini) to travel to his estate for the purpose of teaching the dilettante how to write plays and to act in order to win the affection of a wealthy young Célimène (Ludivine Sagnier) while keeping his daughter and his wife Elmire (Laura Morante) at bay. There are many subplots that tend to distract but in the end the 'play' created by Molière's presence and interaction with all of the other characters provides the life lessons and food for material that leads Molière to be the greatest of French playwrights.

The cast is superb, the visual effects are opulent, the musical score is period correct, and the cinematography finds a fine balance between the lush vistas of the countryside and estates and the grimy realism of the prison and small theaters. Perhaps the story is not historically correct, but no one really knows the true events in the missing portion pf Molière's life, and this version is at least plausible and thought provoking. In French with English subtitles. Grady Harp

While New York Times film critic A.O. Scott may rail at the "fundamentally bogus and anti-literary idea that the great writers of the past wrote what they knew", there is still a pervasive longing out there to discover the connection between an author's life and his work. The audacious premise that great art reflects an author's life experience is promoted in films such as John Madden's Shakespeare in Love and now in Moliére, Laurent Tirard's speculative costume drama of the great French playwright. While the suggestion that the mystery of genius lies in a secret love affair borders on the banal, these films attempt to give us a sense of who these great artists were as people and what may have been at least one source of their inspiration.

Like Shakespeare in Love, Moliére uses guesswork, imagination, and creativity to fill in the blanks when the facts are not readily available. What we do know about the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin known to the world as Moliére is scanty. In 1644 he was a 22-year old actor who spent some time in debtor's prison after his touring company went bankrupt. After that the young actor and aspiring playwright disappeared for several months before he surfaced in the provinces. It was there that he toured with his Illustre Theatre for 13 years before arriving in Paris convinced that tragedy was the only true theater.

Of course, what is not known is what inspired him to take a comic turn, but Tirard allows us to imagine characters and situations that might have led to such great works as "Tartuffe" and "Le Bourgeois Gentlhomme" and 28 other plays which roast the upper classes as affected hypocrites and worse. Soulfully and convincingly performed by Romain Duris, who has been known for dramatic roles such as the pianist in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Moliére is rescued from prison by a bumbling aristocrat named Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini). Jourdain has written a one-act play that he wants to perform at the salon of the haughty widow, marquise Celimene (Ludivine Sagnier) with whom he is smitten.

Paying Moliére's debts, he hires him to teach him the skills of an actor while tricking his graceful wife Elmire (Laura Morante) into believing that he is a priest named Mr. Tartuffe who has come only to counsel his daughter in matters of religion. This ruse runs into problems when Tartuffe/Moliére's falls in love with Madame Jourdain; however their relationship becomes a transforming experience for the actor/playwright when she suggests that he concentrate on writing a different kind of comedy, one that probes the emotions of a drama.

Complications are plentiful as the story moves from comedy to farce, to tragedy and back again with the assistance of a scheming count named Dorante (Edouard Baer) whose goal is to marry his son Thomas (Gillian Petrovsky) to Jourdain's daughter Henriette (Fanny Valette) regardless of the fact that Henriette is in love with her music teacher Valere (Gonzague Requillart). Moliére may not fully capture the true essence of the French author but the fact that it does suggest a writer of depth, wit, and inspiration may entice the viewer to seek out the source material first hand. Granted that the film is speculation, not biography, but it is art and the payoff is a romantic and richly entertaining tribute to one of the greatest playwrights in history.

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.