Quand J'Etais Chanteur

Who knew! Did you know Gérard Depardieu had a new film out? See, this is what happens when you lose touch.

Anyway, a kind and wonderful friend* saved me yesterday, by the simple expedient of suggesting we catch a movie and then just saying, "meet me at the Renoir." The film's English title, bravely continuing the tradition of mangling titles in translation, is The Singer - as opposed to the wonderful French title, Quand J'Etais Chanteur (see, the beginning of a story's already in it...).

Reader? Go to the Renoir. Pretty much now. The man is magnificent, he is a genius - in fact he is, in this film, a mountain - Massif Central - a volcano, that never explodes - he is everything. (to me.) There are several fine performances, but in the middle of them all is this mountain, Depardieu himself, giving what some are already calling the performance of his career (Martin Guerre! Jean de Florette! Monte Cristo! Cyrano!), and I am almost inclined not to disagree. I can certainly see this being the defining performance of this part of his career. The weather, the light and shadow, flit across his face - a split second changes everything - as if he were a landscape in himself. He is simply awe-inspiring, as a god must be.

The film itself is fine, understated, slow-burning, subtle - unlike me - things we've almost forgotten, except that the French, thank God, do remember. (This summer I lay, as regular readers will know, on my couch for a long time watching rented movies, sometimes two or three a day - I had an excuse, I was ill - and, aside from Scorsese, the ones that stand out in my mind now are the French ones). The story, roughly, is this: GD is an overweight, middle-aged, lonely dance hall crooner. There is a complicated scenario with his ex-wife, which I won't give away except to say it makes him even lonelier. Then he meets a young woman...

(She, Cécile de France, is marvellous - the ex-wife is also marvellous, these are ace performances. Everyone catches all sorts of emotional subtleties. As in real life, people's emotional lives aren't simple.)

The film looks wonderfully anxious - jarring - from the first frame the viewer is given nowhere, as it were, to sit. The colours, the lighting - the coloured lights, this being a film about seedy dance halls - are just tremendous, saturated, desperate, like liquid unreality. The open-air scenes are limpid, by contrast, and beautiful. The close-ups on Depardieu's face look as if the notes just said: "crag", and there are some wonderful little set-pieces and set-up shots. One of my favourite things in the film is this silver curtain... and there is a dance class scene (doing a step called "le New York") of such beauty that your correspondent thought she would cry. I want to go again just to look at the art direction.

Like Leconte's Ridicule, this is a film that dwells on feet. Marvellous.

There is a scene in the middle, in the volcano museum, that seems to serve the same purpose as the black-&-white film in Talk to Her or the zoo (planetarium?) in Annie Hall - and once again does it by mixing up reality and unreality so that the unreality has to break and reality come out. So see it, I am giving no spoilers here, and you will see what I mean. I'll give you a teaser, though: Ingrid Bergman's in it.

In short: I wouldn't go so far to say Ms B would start to frequent suburban dance halls or start buying CD's by any aging crooners, but I will definitely be going down to the Renoir again. The only question is how soon.

* the same one who sent me my Clinton bagatelle yesterday. Clinton and Depardieu - hmm...