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Le Colonel Chabert
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Surely
one of the most amusing trends in movie distribution and exhibition of the 1990s
is the refusal to translate certain French titles. It is not hard to figure out
what Le Colonel Chabert or Une pure formalité (1994) mean, but this marketing trick is purely a chic affectation.
These
days we see few of the true art films made in France, but almost all the good
looking, expensive, historical epics, most of which star Gérard Depardieu.
After Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), Germinal (1993) and the Jean
de Florette/Manon des Sources duo (1986)
comes Le Colonel Chabert. Adapted
from a novel by Honoré de Balzac, it marks the directorial debut of
cinematographer Yves Angelo (he shot Claude Sautet’s A
Heart in Winter [1992], among many others).
I’m
one of those cinephiles who tends to cultivate – to the point of blind
unfairness, it’s true – a fierce resistance to beacons of middlebrow quality
cinema such as the Merchant Ivory movies, or Claude Berri’s lavish adaptations
of French literary classics. But Le
Colonel Chabert, like The Remains of the Day (1993),
is a powerful, beautifully crafted film that rises above the mediocrity of its market-niche
type.
Chabert,
incarnated magnificently by Depardieu, returns to his milieu ten years after
having disappeared in the 1807 Battle of Eylau.
Believing him dead, his wife (Fanny Ardant) long ago
remarried a Count (André Dussollier, familiar from
Alain Resnais’ cinema). Rejected and confused,
Chabert seeks justice and personal vindication through legal means.
The
synopsis might evoke memories of The
Return of Martin Guerre (1982 – remade in USA as Sommersby [1993]), but the drama here is
closer to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time
in America (1984). It is a tale of tortured male pathos, in which Chabert
walks among the living like a ghost, shunned by the society that once glorified
him.
It
is also a tale about the distribution of power in a specific social sphere, and
the uneven micro-powers wielded by individuals as they navigate the various
contracts of law, marriage and property. The undoubted master in this game is
the shifty lawyer Derville, played by Fabrice Luchini (Éric Rohmer caught his prodigious talent young in Claire’s
Knee [1970], as did Walerian Borowczyk in Immoral
Tales [1973]).
Angelo’s
direction is quietly confident, full of telling touches. Again and again, it is
the small detail – the off-hand gesture, the prudent cut-away – which
transforms an otherwise conventional dialogue scene into something memorable.
The stark scenes of bloody battle and aftermath have the tragic tone of Orson
Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1965) or
Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974).
The story told by Le Colonel Chabert is not edifying. The mood is unrepentantly gloomy, even bathetic. Like Gillian Armstrong’s version of Little Women (1994), it may prompt some viewers to wonder whether such a story is at all relevant to our time. But, as the sales figures on Helen Garner’s controversial non-fiction book The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power (1995) suggest, tales of old bastards left out in the cold still seem to have a mighty popular appeal. © Adrian Martin April 1995 |
