Philippe Le Guay: CYCLING WITH MOLIÈRE (2013)
FABRICE LUCHINI AND LAMBERT WILCON IN CYCLING WITH MOLIERE
Actors and misanthropes
In his fourth outing with the director Philippe Le Guay, in a movie whose premise he himself thought of, actor Fabrice Luchini plays Serge Tanneur, a celebrated stage actor retired for three years from the theater following a nervous breakdown. Serge has retreated to the French resort region of Île de Ré where he's inherited an ample mess of a house from a lonely uncle and has renounced acting forever. A former colleague, Gautier Valence (Lambert Wilson, Of Gods and Men, The Princess of Montpensier), now a hit playing a brain surgeon on a hammy TV medical drama, wants to lure Serge back for a production of a classic, Molière's The Misanthrope, an opportunity for Gautier to turn more legit. A misanthrope to play The Misanthrope may seem- a bit obvious, but Luchini is a famous champion of French literary classics who fills Paris theaters for his recitations of Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Céline, and other French classic writers. This role is custom tailored for him, his idea, and he's been working out his interpretation of Alceste, Molière's morose protagonist for decades It's all a game, a literary game, and the game of an intelligent populiariser, one well suited to appeal to an older art house audiences in Anglophone venues as well as French ones.
You can look at this two ways. Serge teases Gautier, insisting on five intense days of rehearsals before he decides if he'll relent and come to Paris for the play. Maybe these are the best moments, when the two actors read and reread, trading back and forth between Alceste and his more moderate counterpart, Philinte, because both want the bigger role of Alceste. They're oral thespian tennis matches, lessons in the infinite tonalities of interpreting roles and rendering 17th-century French alexandrines so they're alive and contemporary and still faithful to every syllable. They spar about how to do that, as they spar about who will take which role.
Or you may argue that the best moments aren't these at all, which are a bit obvious and staid, but rather the flirtations with attractive women who turn up. There's Zoé (Laurie Bordesoules), a hotelier's blonde budding porn star niece; and a sexy Italian woman in the midst of an angry divorce (Maya Sansa). And there's Gautier's mixture of embarrassments and ego-gratifications of TV-stardom, and both men's various mildly slapstick comic mishaps. An obvious but still effective theatrical "coup" is that Zoé stuns both actors to speechlessness by delivering, when asked, a fresh and lovely reading of Molière.
In fact the movie could not function if it didn't alternate between both aspects, the classic theatrical exercises and the human comedy. The essential life of the movie comes out of the total human contrast and interplay of the two actors in the story and the two actors playing them. Superficial though the premise is, limiting of dramatic possibility, this movie does not just allow but forces Luchini and Wilson, at moments anyway, to dig deep into themselves, show what they can do and who they are.
Though their essences remain somewhat a mystery. Luchini has said this of Wilson in an interview with Le Figaro: "Wilson remains enigmatic to me." And the character of Serge, unlike Gautier, who has an agent and a girlfriend, is isolated and tight-lipped about his private life, if he has any (as Luchini himself tends to be in public). Maybe, in the end, Le Guay (whose last outing with Luchini was the warm drama of a humanized rich guy, The Women on the 6th Floor,) doesn't go as deep as he could into either the literary and theatrical explorations or the flirtations and contretemps. But it would be churlish to harp on that, when so many aspects of the movie are in their way so entertaining and gracefully orchestrated, and when the premise is so original. There really may be more here than meets the eye. Bring your annotated copy of Le Misanthrope, in French. What maybe isn't all that interesting are the bicycle rides around the island. But the island in winter, rainy, depopulated, off season, is itself one of the stars of the show. Meanwhile, a longtime talk show hit, packing 'em in for his theatrical literary readings, and having recently scored on screen for Potiche, 6th Floor, and Ozon's excellent In the House, Fabrice LUchini is at the summit of his career.
Cycling [aka Bicycling] with Molière/Alceste à bicyclette, 104 mins., was shown at the Rendez-vous du Cinéma Français in Paris in January 2013 and at the Berlinale - Market, and opened in France 16 January. It was included in Tribeca, 23 April 2014. Strand releasing distributes it in the US and its theatrical release begins 2 May 2014 in Los Angeles. In New York it's debuting at Film Forum 23 April-6 May, 2014.
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