MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tous les Matins du Monde’ Hits Right Notes : The French import is not historically rigorous, profound or dramatically deep--yet it’s a striking, rich show.
MICHAEL WILMINGTON
Films about classical music can turn into dolorous celebrations of taste and sensibility: the audience's and the filmmakers'.
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Los Angeles Times
Films about classical music can turn into dolorous celebrations of taste and sensibility: the audience’s and the filmmakers’. Happily, Alain Corneau’s “Tous les Matins du Monde” (playing at Goldwyn Pavilion and Sunset 5), which won seven 1991 French “Cesars,” or Oscar equivalents, rises above these temptations. Centered on an imagined relationship between the 17th-Century composers Marin Marais and M. de Sainte Colombe, it’s a striking, rich show--though not for the elitist reasons that may pop up in reviews. “Tous les Matins” is not historically rigorous, profound or dramatically deep. One might even quarrel with the slick way Jordi Savall arranges its period score.

But there’s something hypnotic about it, anyway. This movie, shot in Creuse in a lovely period chateau, where the lake breeds nightmares and autumnal breezes shiver the trees, has a rapt, sensuous rhythm. It’s full of fine music: Lully’s and Francois Couperin’s as well as Marais’ and Colombe’s. And it’s a big, juicy star vehicle for Gerard Depardieu (who shares the role of Marais with his son, Guillaume), Jean-Pierre Marielle (as Colombe) and Anne Brochet (as Colombe’s daughter, Madeleine).

These actors get to scream, cry, mistreat each other, suffer unrequited love, insult aristocrats, die horribly or become transported by grief, remorse or beautiful music. Scriptwriter Pascal Quignard, adapting his own novel, and writer-director Alain Corneau have given them a field day.

We know little of Marais and less of St. Colombe--not even his first name--and the script turns their lives into dubious fiction, in order to craft, as in “Amadeus,” a fable about artistic integrity and compromise. For writer and director the reclusive St. Colombe was an ascetic saint of music, defiant, celibate, constantly mourning his wife and rudely contemptuous of power. Marais was his opposite: a brilliant, but opportunistic, somewhat amoral young man who exploits St. Colombe, seduces and ruins his daughter, and then lives a voluptuary’s high life at the court of the sun king, Louis XIV, while the Colombe family wither in obscurity.

Is any of the scandal true? Very little. And there’s little irony in this fable. The world and flesh (Marais) and the soul and art (St. Colombe) are shown in instant antagonism, the stage set for some climactic duet.

Yet, what makes the picture work is the way these actors feel the roles, the way Corneau and his cinematographer (Yves Angelo) feel the landscape. These characters aren’t real musicians; they’re musicians of our romantic dreams. And the film gives a moral, even religious, dimension to their art. Their sins will rot them; their good works will be rewarded by eternity in the concert hall.

Corneau doesn’t quite direct “Tous les Matins” as an art film. Instead, he establishes the taut rhythms and tense shifts of a moody thriller, a form at which he once excelled (“Police Python 39,” “Serie Noire”). And Depardieu, a great and indefatigable actor, starts the movie with a showstopper: a six-minute unbroken close-up in which the elderly Marais, in the last stages of his court career, reminisces brokenly on his relationship with the long-dead St. Colombe.

His wig askew, his face a trembling ruin of tears, flabby cheeks and smeared rouge, Depardieu does a mesmerizing portrait of guilt, decay and vulnerability. When the film later moves into a sustained tone of somber austerity, interrupted by violence, that first scene echoes over everything.

Jean-Pierre Marielle puts St. Colombe in a more stoic key. Marielle’s tall, stooping posture and monumental features suggest the ultimate French bourgeois authority figure. He’s the De Gaulle of actors, and though he began as a comic player for De Broca, Berri and others, his dramatic gifts deepened with age. Here, he’s an enigma, an obsessive idealist, suspicious of Marais from the start. Marielle tends to chew up Guillaume Depardieu as young Marais, but Anne Brochet--the Roxanne of Depardieu’s “Cyrano de Bergerac”--is equally strong as Madeleine.

The picture has an eerie rhythm that almost recalls the sonorous vamp of Marais’ masterpiece, the “Sonnerie of St. Genevieve,” and a theme that suggests that musical composition is a near sacred calling. But the ensemble makes this libretto sing. All the being of these two men, “Tous les Matins du Monde” (Times-rated Mature for sensuality) hints, is poured into their works. And, in the film, at its best, the melodies soar up, beyond folly or tragedy, becoming what the creators intended: the imprints of two souls.

‘Tous les Matins du Monde’

Gerard Depardieu: Marin Marais

Jean-Pierre Marielle: M. de St. Colombe

Anne Brochet: Madeleine de St. Colombe

Guillaume Depardieu: Young Marais

A Jean-Louis Livi presentation, released by October Films. Director Alain Corneau. Producer Jean-Louis Livi. Screenplay by Pascal Quignard. Cinematographer Yves Angelo. Editor Marie-Josephe Yoyotte. Costumes Corrine Jorry. Music Jordi Savall, Marais, St. Colombe Jean-Baptiste Lully, Francois Couperin. Set designer Bernard Vezat. Sound Pierre Gamet. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (sensuality).