FILM OF THE WEEK: The Princess of Montpensier

FILM OF THE WEEK: The Princess of Montpensier

by Vadim Rizov

No one's ever enquired how many miles Bertrand Tavernier has energetically dragged his camera across: his movies literally move fast. The Princess of Montpensier's opening grabs your attention immediately, as bodies crawl on the green to a more removed view of sword-wielding horsemen mowing soldiers down, the image craning up as the riders keep chasing their foes across a stream. Tavernier's a sincere admirer/student of classical Hollywood, and the opening moments of Princess deliver raids, duels and rousing action. It won exactly one Cesar Award: for costumes.

Always respected but rarely fashionable, Tavernier began his career as a press agent: he promoted Contempt and Cleo From 5 To 7, among others, while taking notes. He began working in the '70s, placing him between the New Wavers he promoted and the new generation of movie brats (Leos Carax on one end, Luc Besson) that shook up French film in the '80s. His movies have conventional narratives (in France, he's a commercial filmmaker) and a surplus of vigorous style. His moving shots (horizontally or vertically) are played for speed rather than elegance: in 1981's Coup De Torchon, sometimes he's moving so fast the camera's shaking (as in Samuel Fuller's similarly urgent movies).

Despite the trappings of a Errol Flynn/Tyrone Power throwback (there's a fun staircase duel later), much of Montpensier is concerned with court intrigues, education and business transactions which shape every romantic impulse. Finding a love triangle inadequate, Tavernier offers up a six-sided tangle of allegiances. Marie (Melanie Thierry) is slated to marry Mayenne de Guise (C�sare Domboy) but loves his brother Henri (Gaspard Ulliel). That becomes irrelevant when her father changes the arrangement and pairs her off with the Prince of Montpensier, played by Gr�goire LePrince-Ringuet. (The seemingly relieved Mayenne, who realizes what a mess he's getting into, basically disappears at this point.) The Prince's aide, the Comde de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), also fancies her but quickly disciplines himself into the role of courtly, sexless mentor and advisor. All this must be mediated by the Duc d'Anjou (Raphael Personnaz), an overtly leering satyr type who can't let the Princess ruin court diplomacy, heaving bosom or not.

It sounds like a bodice-ripper akin to Forever Amber, where global transactions change depending on a high-toned courtesan's whims. Tavernier fights off the impulse with typically fastidious research, displayed in odd, refreshing bits of trivia. There's a comical wedding dinner, where Marie's father (Philippe Magnan) gives accurate-sounding instructions on how to raise and prepare your very own freshwater eels. Even more alien is the ensuing night, where the two fathers play chess while the young couple enact the sacred act of devirginization, surrounded in their bedroom by a coterie of servants waiting to display the ceremonial hymen blood.

"Michael Powell told me that he liked films where the hero is wrong in three or four scenes but without the author of the film pointing them out," Tavernier noted in 2002. "I adore that!" To that end, the otherwise admirable Comte?the film's ultimate linchpin?at one point delivers a ridiculous disquisition on poetry and the necessity of rhyme, chastising the Princess for her errant taste. Moments like that are a different breed of historical grounding, all of which mediate between Tavernier's classicist impulses (sneaking in an old-fashioned duel or a fitting scene of ballroom intrigue) and his urge to stay historically accurate. Critical response to Princess at its Cannes unveiling was pretty hostile, with lots of whining about how predictable all the 16th Century derring-do was. It's the wrong way of looking at things: Princess puts a predictable plot through the most vigorous of paces. It's the kind of B-movie Tavernier likes: straight thrills and action, verisimilitude and skepticism at the edges. (He's cited John Ford's self-dissecting, ambivalently right-wing Westerns as an early inspiration.)

The story's flimsy, and at 139 minutes, this isn't a recommended introduction to Tavernier. However, Montpensier is as fun and fast as any of the veteran's past work. He's inspired by a lot of the same American directors that have served as touchstones to generations of French auteurs and auteurists, but he's much more appropriate in his appropriations than, say, a young buck like Serge Bozon, whose 2007 La France bears the same relationship to the cited works of Jacques Tourneur's Hollywood as would Andy Warhol's factory girls to classic Tinseltown stars.

Perhaps that contributes to his perpetual unfashionability: Tavernier mostly works with the conventional, and he films battles better than most. The most surprising fights, though, aren't between the knights on steeds and their fleeing enemies, but the lurkers on the ground, who?rather than just standing and waiting to be cut down?take control of their chargers' spears and yank them down. Casually depicted unfamiliar details, on the battlefield and in the royal court, add excitement to the fights and new credibility to the melodrama.

Posted by ahillis at April 12, 2011 1:31 PM

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