Tous les matins du monde

This is a beautiful movie - everything about it lingers on after you watch it. The music in particular...deep, sweet and sad. Gerard Depardieu is perfect as the ambitious and opportunistic talented viol musician. Alain Corneau makes his viewers feel as if they are right there, in every scene, experiencing the same emotions. Monsieur de Sainte Colombe chooses to live his life as a hermit, shut away from the artificiality and glamour of the royal court. His dedication to his dead wife and the music that he loves are the only things that keep him going. A strict disciplinarian, he forces his daughters to follow the example he has set them, and perhaps this is the reason for Madeleine's later sadness.

All in all, I felt that the film was a touching tribute to the sadness and grief that make true love so beautiful.

This movie is a take on what does music mean. Monsieur de Sainte Colombe (1640-1700), in a wonderfully sensitive performance by Jean-Pierre Marielle, was devastated by the loss of his wife. This inspired him to compose what might have been the first real "soul" music (from the gut) to see the wider audience (i.e. Surviving to this day). His most famous student was Marin Marain (1656-1728), played by Gerard Depardieu (both pere and fils). He was accepted as student but told perhaps a bit too dismissively that although he played well he was most fit for public squares and perhaps the Court, the latter held in deep contempt by Sainte-Colombe.

Subsequently we indeed do see Marain bouncing a pole on the the Royal floor (apparently they way they conducted back then) leading a group of Court musicians in what was simply the music of the age, i.e., pomp and circumstance, but within the context of the story hopelessly dull and inartistic. Can the story mean simply that music should have feeling? Or is there more? A prevailing cliche is when there are no longer words to describe, that's where music starts. Is that good enough? What would Monseiur de Sainte Colombe say about that?

There is a subplot involving love interest that informs the theme. As indicated above, the young Marain is played by Gerard's son with the latter taking over as the adult. Wow, how often does that happen? Depardieu fils is impressive. There are fairly long music passages that the uninitiated might find a tough go but it is a well-made film, meticulously so. Well worth it for those who hang around.

France -17th Century. Little known 17th Century viol player and composer Monsieur de Sainte Colombe regarded public performance as an act that corrupted the purity of music. Since his wife's death, he had lived in isolation with his two daughters Madeleine and Toinette –until a young musician, Marin Marais, convinces him to teach him viol. The ambitious pupil, aware of the unique quality of his master's music, will stop at nothing to get hold of the scores. The entire movie is played in rhythm with the viol -slow, melancholic, pure, beautiful. Action addicts should not even try to watch. But art lovers will have a delightful time.

This is a great movie. It's a stunning look at the nature of music and it's a wonderful example of the relationship between music and film. So often in film, music is the afterthought; it's the last step of the production process and often the least considered through production. Corneau's film really works well to blend the visual medium of film with music and show them working in tandem for a brilliant result.

When you hear music in this film, you hear it because a character has picked up an instrument to play it. The film then cuts away from character and instrument, but the music remains and turns into a soundtrack that enhances the emotional power of the film. This is source music used as score, and very rarely do you see that in film. Using the music in this way really deepens the experience and strengthens both the images of the film and the emotion of the music. A music student gave me this movie to watch, and I want to pass it on to film students looking to blend the arts of film and music.

'Tous les matins du monde' opens with remarkable, yet quiet and simple audacity. For ten minutes, over the credits and beyond, the camera holds on the pained face of Gerard Depardieu. This shot, about as minimalist as you can get, manages to suggest so much: the actual scene itself (Depardieu as Marais giving a music lesson in Royal Chambers to a number of inept students), his own life and sense of failure, aging, dissipation of talent and emotional paralysis despite the signs of status and wealth, the intimations of a past and a place so alien to the modern and showy Court as to be on a different plane of time and space altogether. It is brilliant cinema, while seeming not very cinematic at all.

'Matins' combines two genres I generally find loathsome and redundant, and yet it is very nearly a masterpiece. First of all, it is a biopic; not really of Marais at all, but his one time teacher, Sainte-Colombe, solitary genius of the viol, and possibly the first Romantic artist, someone who composed not for Royalty or riches, but fore himself, from his own soul, alone. The problem with biopics is that they try to cram a whole life into two hours. This clearly doesn't fit, and so only the most superficial precis is possible, with a string of 'key' moments of formative psychological importance. The end result is something like those brief synopses of authors' lives you get at the beginning of books.

Corneau avoids this trap in a number of ways. There is the general atmosphere of fairy tale - the king and his courtiers; the 'cruel' father and the children he locks up in cellars; the abandoned lover and her jealous sister; the fairy-tale location, with its picturesque fragments of classical splendour, and moonlit tarns; the ghost story intrusion of revenants; the mysterious stranger who overturns the family's lives. This extends to the light, the mysterious blue glow that leaves the narrative in a twilight suspension. Depardieu's narration has the unadorned, measured simplicity of fairy tales, and the unmarked accumulation of events gives a timeless feel, one seperate from the historically verifiable Court.

Further, the film doesn't try to cram in the whole of Sainte-Colombe's life. The couple of decades it does deal with are marked by seeming repetiton and monotony. When he claims at one point to have an exciting emotional and imaginary life, his interlocutors are shocked, because they can only see the historical, physical, dour image, not the magic of a mind that converses with the dead, or outpours the most ascetically mournful music. There are key events, but these are domestic and personal (eg the death of his wife) that slowly shape his personality and the events of the film, not jarring 'Eureka!'-like moments. It is up to us to interpret the patterns, the reality behind the plain image, the unmovingly stern face, the routine events.

By the climax, the film stops being a biopic or historical reacreation, and becomes a heightened, spiritual embodiment of ideas about music, family, tradition. This is not to say the film is vague and ahistorical. It is very good about the marginalisation of equally talented women in this world of obsessive male art, where the only useful female is a dead one; and the brief, comical treatment of arbitrary monarchy is as pointed as anything in 'Ridicule'.

The other genre the film belongs to is the dreaded costume drama, that puffed up fashion parade of bourgeois aspiration, where the allusion to people who used their brains is enough to satisfy audiences who refuse to use theirs; where cufflinks and frills are creamily fetishised, and everything else - plot, character, ideas, subtext - is a mere mannequin. If the average costume drama is marked by bustle and excess, Corneau's film is private and austere. The only lavish costumes are made the object of ridicule - Sainte-Colombe, dressed in black and ruff like Monteverdi, and his daughters, live in sober surroundings, and dress very modestly. The usual period props - big homes, lavish halls, etc. - are stripped bare, become almost cell-like, unmarked by human residue.

This extends to the shooting style. The camera very rarely moves, framing the 'action' like a painting or a tableau vivant - the film's fertile theatricality extends to hearing feet thudding on the boards. This seeming visual parsimony is not too austere - unlike the films of Ozu, say, the static picture is broken up by regular editing which makes viewing less taxing. Corneau has learned a lesson about period dramas from Stanley Kubrick, director of the greatest period film, 'Barry Lyndon'. It's useless getting hstorical facts right and swamping the plot with detail - the heart and soul of any society is in its culture, and so Corneau, by recreating or alluding to famous paintings, music etc. gets closer to the truth of his characters. And the lighting...!