MOVIE REVIEW : RISK, LOVE ON ‘A SUNDAY IN COUNTRY’

Bertrand Tavernier’s moving and masterly “A Sunday in the Country” (at the Fine Arts) has a serene, sumptuous surface that is faintly deceptive. Beneath that tranquillity is a film about risk and love, about age and compromise; at its heart it is a cry for bravery, for striking out into the terrifying unknown.

With his wife Colo, Tavernier has adapted the screenplay from the last novel of Pierre Bost. (Earlier, Bost had co-written a great many films, including the memorable “Forbidden Games.”) Their central character is an honored, widowed, passed-over artist, M. Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux), whose comfortable white country house and garden might have been painted by one of his contemporaries, Renoir or Monet.

It is in the leafy countryside outside Paris, only a 10-minute walk from the station. Or so it was, 10 years ago. Now that he is in his 70s, Ladmiral’s regular Sunday walk to meet his dutiful, middle-aged son, Gonzague (Michel Aumont), his pious, oppressively solicitous daughter-in-law (Genevieve Mnich) and their three children takes him a little longer.

Everything about these Sundays is predictable. Youngest of the children, little Mireille, with her blond hair and delectable overbite, will be sick on the train. Mama will nip into the village church for just one extra hit of Mass before Sunday dinner. The two sons’ teasing will bring out their grandfather’s sharper side. And, after Mercedes, the housekeeper, has served them Sunday dinner, everyone will doze in cozy, familial warmth.

Except this Sunday, as Ladmiral’s younger child, Irene (Sabine Azema), bursts in on the gathering, making hardly less commotion than the jolting touring car she’s driven down from Paris. Racy, tall, sunnily outrageous, she exudes self-absorption, authority and her own brash brand of devotion to her father.

She is the film’s--and the family’s--catalyst. Her brother, stuffy though he may now be, had begun as a painter but retired into the business world rather than compete with his father. This act of love (and self-doubt) has earned him only his father’s mild, lifelong scorn. But Gonzague could never criticize his father’s work, or him. It is only the quicksilver Irene, the true artist’s child, who can say to her father, at work on perhaps his 50th studio study, that his work is too tame, too classical, that it lacks passion.

Her loving criticism is not news to him. It is the film’s innermost theme, the pain of an acutely perceptive artist of not the first rank who knows his position exactly. As the afternoon lengthens, father and daughter share a waltz at an outdoor cafe, and he talks to her with rueful dignity about his work.

There was a point when he might have risked everything, changed his style--experimented. But by then he had recognition, correct academy honors. His rosette. And, tenderest confession of all, “It would have hurt your mother to see that I was groping”--at his age. Ladmiral shares with the composer Salieri the awful gift of recognizing the gulf between his work and genius. But, somehow, the painter has not been corroded by it.

The seductive Irene is not on solid ground in her own life. A lovers’ quarrel over the telephone routs her composure utterly. She is gone in the same whirlwind in which she arrived; so vital a character that even as she drives away, her presence seems to linger, still warm, still fragrant. But the film’s end hints that she may have left something more tangible behind.

As Faure chamber music rises to complement the evening scene, Ladmiral goes out to his studio. And, as he studies a blank canvas, with its terrors and obligations, we sense a certain change about him that suggests that her words did not go unheard. It is a quietly promising ending, and part of its exhilaration is from the idea of rebirth at the end of a life.

Tavernier folds past into present, art into life throughout the film. Subtly, the director arranges his scenes to remind us how the great artists who were Ladmiral’s contemporaries looked at this countryside, these people. The outdoor cafe bursts with the life that Irene urges onto her father’s canvases, with dancers and a four-piece band in straw boaters and striped jerseys straight from Manet. Ladmiral’s stolid, devoted housekeeper, Mercedes, looks at times just like Van Gogh’s “L’Arlesienne.”

The two little girls, with their velvet dresses and their jump ropes, whom Ladmiral watches affectionately, are recognizably from Renoir, from one of Ladmiral’s own small oils and perhaps entirely in his memory.

A felicity and intelligence infuse every particle of the film, its clothes, its art direction, editing, photography and music. (The film won for Tavernier the best director award at Cannes in 1984.)

The actors are superb, beginning with Louis Ducreux, who, after a lifetime in the theater as director, composer, theater manager and actor, landed his first major film role here at 73. (One of his polkas is part of the dance hall score.) Quick, humorous, sturdy, gallant, compassionate, his Ladmiral is a noble portrait.

Sabine Azema is his perfect foil as his adored Irene. In a role that could be irritating in less expert hands, the beautiful Azema has sensitivity under her boldness and a buoyancy that carries the whole film with it. The two make the farewell of father and daughter, as she tells him how handsome he is (and he is ) and he whispers, “Stay young,” something almost unbearably poignant.

‘A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY’ An MGM/UA Classics Release of a Sara Films/Films A2/Little Bear co-production. Producer Alain Sarde. Director Bertrand Tavernier. Screenplay Bertrand and Colo Tavernier, based on the novel “Monsieur Ladmiral va bientot mourir” by Pierre Bost. Camera Bruno De Keyzer. Art director Patrice Mercier. Costumes Yvonne Sassinot De Nesles. Sound Guillaume Sciama. Music Gabriel Faure; additional music Louis Ducreux, Marc Perrone. With Louis Ducreux, Sabine Azema, Michel Aumont, Genevieve Mnich, Monique Chaumette, Katia Wostrikoff, Thomas Duval, Quentin Ogier, Claude Winter.

MPAA-rated: G.

Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.