La petite Lili

"La Petite Lili" is a delightful, visually enticing reinterpretation of Chekhov's "The Seagull" through a very Gallic sensibility, similar to how "Clueless" updated and Americanized Austen's "Emma."

While retaining most of the original dialogue and plot as a droll commentary on the more things change the more they stay the same, co-writer/director Claude Miller cleverly updates the artistic medium of debate from literature to film and uses his visual powers to very sensually illustrate the sub-text that in most productions is stifled under 19th century Russian costumes.

Because for all the high falultin' talk of aesthetics and generational conflict, and intellectual art vs. commercial pandering, lust is the primary motivator. Essentially, all the men are led around by their genitals and the women are empowered by controlling them (and it was suspenseful as to which of the competing women would succeed at it for the long run as to whether any of the men could remain faithful to them). For all their intellectual pretensions, all the characters are ruled by their emotions.

Miller wonderfully sets us up for the hot indolence of a country home weekend with a nude nubile Ludivine Sagnier, triggering a much more more effective mise en scene than Bernardo Bertolucci did in "Stealing Beauty." The effect Sagnier has on all the gathered extended family members is palpable and her brazen manipulations are consistent through to the ironic conclusion.

I thought through most of the movie that the director was possibly unaware of just how equally visually mesmerizing her counterpart Robinson Stévenin is on screen, as only one character responds to him, until I saw that James Dean is thanked in the acknowledgments and realized that Miller was using this brooding hunk as an archetype as well (his one final smile is almost a shock).

The last act is a culminating commentary on Chekhov's jarring denouement, claiming that "this is how it should have turned out." Miller softens some of the punishing sexism of the original while putting together a film-within-a-film like Hamlet's play-within-a-play that revenges on the ex-girlfriend, the mother, the mother's lover, etc. full of both comedy and tension.

The sub-titles are many times white on white for difficult reading.

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.

Some girls seem to be sweet and loving, as undesigning as lambs, but then they are revealed as ruthlessly ambitious, unfeeling, opportunistic, and ready to betray at the drop of a hat. Such a one is 'little Lily', the sweet local girl who is having an affair with Julien (played by Robinson Stévenin), a young lad whose mother is a French movie star (Nicole Garcia). The main action of the film is set one summer on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, very near to the megalithic ruins of Carnac (which do not appear in the film) and the Bay of Quiberon. The remainder of the story is 'four years later' in Paris. Little Lily is played by the ever-so-sweet Ludivine Sagnier. Such a gentle soul, so loving, so harmless. But aha! The film star mother has a famous film director visiting for the weekend named Brice (suavely played by Bernard Giraudeau), and Lily drops Julien in an instant, seduces Brice, and is off to Paris with him in a trice. (Brice in a trice, geddit?) Pining hopelessly after Julien is the quiet, self-effacing Jeanne-Marie, played by Julie Depardieu (daughter of the famous Russsian actor Gerard Putin). She is very good indeed in her role, with just a whiff of Chekhov about her, which is just as well, as this film is inspired by a Chekhov play called CHAYKA. She was very good in the film LES FEMMES DE L'OMBRE (aka FEMALE AGENTS, 2008, see my review) and has appeared in 70 titles, as many titles as it took men to translate the Septuagint. Ludivine Sagnier is so amazingly talented that one gasps to think of it (and one also gasps to look at her, but that is a different matter). I recently praised her brilliant acting in LOVE CRIME (CRIME D'AMOUR, 2010, see my review) and previously praised her genius in A SECRET (UN SECRET, 2007, see my review) directed by the same master director who made this film, the amazing Claude Miller (pronounced 'Millaire' because he is French). This film is really very subtle and disturbing, as well as intensely satirical. The people play out their drama, and then later they all agree to play themselves in a film in which they re-enact the very same drama four years later. Well, you can't get more ironical than that. And Little Lily begs and schemes and pleads to be allowed to play herself betraying Julien despite the fact that Julien has now become a film director and he is actually directing it. The ironies are so great that they produce enough highly-wrought iron to construct a suspension bridge of emotion, reaching all the from Brittany to Paris. Yes, Monsieur Millaire was having his little joke with his Little Lily, and God knows he may have been having his revenge too, since one readily imagines that he has known at least one, if not ten, Lilies, and perhaps he wanted to rub a few noses in the dung of betrayal, and to expose the hollow nature of fame and the falsity of cinematic illusions. The house by the sea is so marvellous one wants to move in immediately, by the way, for that section of the film was all done on location. How does one make a booking? Can you pay for a week there by buying enough cinema tickets? I do hope so, for after all, why does one watch movies anyway, if not to erase from time to time the borderline between reality and fantasy? In fact, I volunteer to enact the role of Julien anytime, at least in the initial scenes, before he gets dumped. This film really is very intriguing, and if the French only knew how to make decent tea, I would call round one afternoon to pay my respects to this house full of squabbling folk. I'm sure they are all still there coping with their emotions with more or less success.

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.

The film starts off a little awkwardly. I wasn't quite sure where it was going or if I wanted to go with it, but like all great films it slowly got under my skin. By the second half I was totally engaged and rate it right up there with my favourites.

Like Antonioni's, The Dreamers, this film captures the awkwardness and passion of being young but also offers a reflection on growing older.

This film is not for people looking for typical Hollywood fare. It a classic European film that draws you slowly into these characters lives. The film takes it's time to get where it's going, but when you get there you're glad you went along for the ride.