Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/07/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, March 7, 2024

A Sunday in the Country (Bertrand Tavernier, 1984)

Sabine Azéma and Louis Ducreux in A Sunday in the Country

Cast: Louis Ducreux, Michel Aumont, Sabine Azéma, Geneviève Mnich, Monique Chaumette, Thomas Duval, Quentin Ogier, Katia Wostrikoff, Claude Winter. Screenplay: Bertrand Tavernier, Colo Tavernier, based on a novel by Pierre Bost. Cinematography: Bruno de Keyzer. Production design: Patrice Mercier. Film editing: Armand Psenny.

Bertrand Tavernier's autumnal A Sunday in the Country appropriately evokes several famous paintings, including Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party and Seurat's La Grande Jatte. The film's central character is a painter, M. Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux), an elderly survivor of the era in which those masterpieces were created, and some of the film's wistful tone is set by his acknowledgement that he never rose to their heights. It is a Sunday in the late summer of 1912 at his country home near Paris, and he welcomes the arrival by train of his son, Gonzague (Michel Aumont), and daughter-in-law (Geneviève Mnich) and their three children, the boisterous Emile (Thomas Duval) and Lucien (Quentin Ogier) and the somewhat petted Mireille (Katia Wostrikoff). But his daughter, Irène (Sabine Azéma), also shows up, driving her own car, and her free-spirited manner contrasts with the stuffiness of Gonzague and his wife. There are a couple of crises: Mireille somehow gets stuck up a tree, and Irène receives an upsetting phone call from her lover, whom she has been trying to reach throughout the afternoon. But mostly the film is a study of family dynamics in an era that's about to be blown away by World War I. Tavernier and his cast give the otherwise uneventful narrative a lovely, delicate tension.