As Aventuras de 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' 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

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)

Laurent Tirard's costume comedy "Molière" finds comparison with "Shakespeare in Love" rather easily, and perhaps most dauntingly, to its legendary subject's own durable narratives. But while there's not as much details missing from the 17th-century French playwright Moliere's (Romain Duris) life as there was in Shakespeare's, there's still ample room for a fanciful imagination and conjecture.

The window is small, for Tirard and co-writer Grégoire Vigneron to present the missing weeks of Molière's life after his brief imprisonment for not paying his debts, just before he embarked with his troupe on a 13-year tour of the French provinces before his triumphant return to the theatre scene in Paris. The driving point in this film, as it was in "Shakespeare in Love", is how great art tends to imitate life and how muses tend to stem from elaborate romances, which in this case is Molière's torrid affair with the wealthy Monsieur Jourdain's (Fabrice Luchini) wife Elmire (an enthralling Laura Morante).

Tirard's first salvo and indeed the one that sustains its premise throughout the end, is his understanding that a film about Molière has to be a farce, an important element that shapes his later and most important works when romance, gender politics and the moral bankruptcy of the French aristocracy become his staples. As a staunch tragedian, he gets an early education in the deviancy of the social class from the misguidedly smitten Jourdain who picks him out from his cell to help him perfect his self-written play to impress the blueblood snob, Célimene (Ludivine Sagnier). But "Molière", for all its charm and spirited performances does play rather loose in its opening hour, setting up the strands to be tangled in its second half. The modern transposition of the ringing hypocrisy of the rapacious upper class and eager capitalists ingratiating themselves into a privileged circle offers up its most scintillating prospects.

Nonetheless, flawed in his initial insistence of tragedy as the spirit of true art, it would seem that while Molière's life is a stage, he's not yet in on the act. Duris plays his character with an insinuating intelligence, cynically wearing a scowl on his face but a twinkle of hope in his eyes, all with a precise intensity that threatens to spill over. A hard sell for a light comedy bordering on fluff, but Molière plays the crucial role of the straight man in his own farce. There's no sombre reverence to Molière and his work, though the film hints at the genesis of his later plays through overtly familiar circumstances, making it a more fruitful experience for those intimate with his works.

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.