newcritics

Moliere is the French answer to Shakespeare in Love.

Both movies present their playwright heroes as young romantics and show them picking up stray bits of dialog and observing characters and stumbling into situations that the audience knows will later turn up in their plays.  In Shakespeare in Love, we see the origins of Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and even Hamlet, and watch Shakespeare write and rewrite Romeo and Juliet based on what is happening in his love life.  In Moliere, Moliere lives out scenes from Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and The Bourgeois Gentleman verbatim.

And both movies take off from the same premise, that a single great love took hold of each playwright and transformed and ennobled their art, causing each to create a new form of comedy.

In Shakespeare in Love, that great love wanders into Shakespeare’s theater and literally collaborates with him in the writing of Romeo and Juliet.  In Moliere, it’s the playwright himself who wanders into someone else’s life.  The movie removes Moliere from his troupe of players and from Paris, and the result is, that while in SIL, Shakespeare is shown to be always at work even when he’s in bed with his mistresses, Moliere is separated from the theatre and his art throughout most of the movie.  He’s stuck inside the plots of several of his plays but it doesn’t much matter that he is the playwright or a playwright or even an actor.  He could be any opportunistic rogue who sees his way clear for making a few quick francs and sleeping with another man’s beautiful wife.  He could in fact be Tartuffe.  Might as well be Tartuffe.  In fact, the whole time I was watching the movie I kept wishing he was Tartuffe.  I would have liked to have seen the same cast in adaptations of The Bourgeois Gentleman and Tartuffe.  At least those would have been funny from beginning to end.

Moliere is mostly just amusing.

I’m not sure that Shakespeare invented a new form of comedy, but Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It would appear to be the result of a great leap of either heart or imagination over the farces A Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew such as might have been caused by Shakespeare’s own heartbreak.  They are compassionate comedies, asking us to laugh at what their characters do and say but not at the characters themselves.  We are asked to care about their feelings and to worry about their happiness, even when they are acting foolishly or badly.  Pain and sadness are not just what will be their rewards if they fail.  Their pains and their sadnesses are already part of who they are. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies are comedies in that they end happily but if we were to see a contemporary play or movie or TV show that was of the same spirit as his comedies we’d probably call it a drama.

Moliere’s comedies are psychologically realistic and his characters do experience emotions we can sympathize with.  But the big difference between what he wrote and what Shakespeare wrote is that love was never Moliere’s main subject.

Moliere doesn’t make the case that Moliere invented a new form of comedy.  It simply states that he did, as if it’s a well-established fact that the audience doesn’t need to have explained to them; we just need a few reminders.  So at the end we’re shown snippets of Moliere and his troupe acting out scenes from several of his plays that include scenes and lines of dialog we recognize as having been reworked from earlier scenes in the movie.

“Oh, I see, he gave her lines to the boy here,” we can say with the self-congratulatory air of someone who has just polished off a crossword puzzle with a three letter word for a flightless bird.

But in the ending of Shakespeare in Love we watch that new form of comedy created before our eyes in a scene that is a visually and lyrically gorgeous retelling of Twelfth Night filled with all the separated lovers’ remembered joy and all their heartbreak and all their painful longing for a reunion that can only take place in their imaginations.

Twelfth Night used to be one of my favorites of Shakespeare’s comedies, mainly because when I was a kid I saw a hilarious production starring Fred Gwynne—yes, Herman Munster—as Sir Toby Belch. But I always thought of it as Sir Toby’s play, not Viola’s, and over the years I had come to take it for granted.  But the last scene of Shakespeare in Love made me fall in love with Twelfth Night all over again, and made me fall in love with Viola and see the play through her eyes, and if you’re looking for a great night with Shakespeare at the movies, try a double feature of Shakespeare in Love followed by this adaptation of Twelfth Night, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Kingsley, and Imelda Staunton.

It may be that I’m not familiar enough with either Moliere or his plays.  I’ve only seen two productions, a fine but rather safe staging of Tartuffe at Boston University and an interesting version of The Misanthrope set in contemporary Hollywood, which allowed for the re-casting of at least one male character as a woman, a change that did not alter the character’s character or her role in the plot a single bit, which is some sort of comment on how we are often more defined by our jobs than by our gender.   I don’t count Jim Dale’s Scapino, the first Broadway show I ever saw, because all Dale took from Moliere’s Scapin was the bare outline of the plot.  I’ve read and re-read all of Moliere’s most famous plays, or at least all the ones that are famous here.  I don’t know which ones the French regard as his greatest.  And I read them only to try to imagine what they’d be like on stage, not to let them play out on their own in my imagination.  I don’t enjoy reading them for their own sake, because I don’t like rhymed verse, even in Shakespeare, although with Moliere the problem may the translations.  (Richard Wilbur’s are said to be excellent.)  So it may be that I was just not as predisposed to be caught up in Moliere the way I was with SIL.

But finally I don’t think the premise works with Moliere.  It’s more convincing to posit that Shakespeare’s comedy was transformed by love because all his comedies are love stories.  The couple in love are the main characters and we are meant to care, and do care, about whether or not they’ll get together in the end.  Try to look at Moliere’s comedies as love stories and you’ll quick come to the conclusion that Moliere was a rather heartless bastard.

But love is only a device in his plays, the object of the rogue or the scoundrel or the hypocrite’s machinations. In almost all of them,  the lovers who get together in the end are secondary characters, a juvenile and an ingenue without much personality of their own unless they are likable buffoons, as in School for Wives.

But Moliere didn’t write romantic comedies.  He wrote social and psychological satires.  The actual plot of Moliere begins (the movie takes a while to get warmed up and underway) with Moliere being thrown into jail for debt.  It would have made sense to leave him there for the whole movie because the kind of comedies he wrote are more informed by a view of life one is more likely to develop in a 17th Century prison than in even the most beautiful and intelligent and large-hearted woman’s bed.   

As the middle-aged and married object of Moliere’s desire and his supposed inspiration as a playwright, Laura Morante is incredibly beautiful, intelligent, and large-hearted and you can see how any one who winds up in her bed would feel inspired.

Unfortunately, the only inspiring advice the script gives her to give Moliere is of the “Write about what people are really like” variety—writers’ workshop boilerplate stuff.

Which reminds me.  Another advantage Shakespeare in Love has over Moliere is its screenwriter.  Somehow I’m not convinced that either director Laurent Tirard or his co-screenwriter Gregoire Vigneron are France’s answer to Tom Stoppard.

Morante is gorgeous to look at, a painting come to life, as is the film: if Van Dyck came back to earth and started making movies, they would look like Moliere.

(Set designs and lighting by Vermeer.  Props and set dressings by Chardin.)

Romain Duris is a compelling, charismatic monster of ego and lust on the verge of gobbling up whatever woman falls into his clutches.  His lip-tightened grin seems to be concealing a wolf’s set of choppers.  His Moliere is only happy, and only funny, when he’s acting (it would have been fun if the movie had let Duris, and Moliere, do more of their acting on a stage); otherwise, he’s a dour, angry, and borderline depressive character, which, if it isn’t true of the historical Moliere, is true of most comedians and satirists.

Franco- and cine-philiacally related:  The Siren reviews the 1944 Simone Simon classic Mademoiselle Fifi.

Moliere.  Directed by Laurent Tirard; screenplay (in French, with English subtitles) by Laurent Tirard and Grégoire Vigneron.  Starring Romain Duris (Molière), Fabrice Luchini (Jourdain), Laura Morante (Elmire), Edouard Baer (Dorante), Ludivine Sagnier (Celimene) and Fanny Valette (Henriette).  120 minutes.  SONY Pictures 2008.