CRITIC’S NOTES : DECEPTIVE SURFACE OF A TAVERNIER ‘SUNDAY’

It was a remark by my thoughtful moviegoing friend that made me think again about Bertrand Tavernier’s superb “A Sunday in the Country,” which has opened here at last (it’s at the Fine Arts), having made numerous year-end and critics’ lists across the country. She liked it, she said, but after a spate of big Christmas movies and a recent detour to an epic-sized Sergio Leone, she had to scale down to its quietude and to the apparent lack of anything going on during Monsieur Ladmiral’s country Sunday.

It’s true. “Nothing” actually happens at this big, white comfortable house outside Paris in the early 1900s. Ladmiral, a courtly widowed painter, is visited by his dutiful son and his son’s family and--unexpectedly--by the artist’s beautiful free spirit of a daughter. But things are put into motion during that day that may require a leap of great artistic courage on the part of this settled, very minor artist. On reflection, this apparently tranquil surface with ferment underneath is part of virtually every Tavernier film.

“Sunday” is set in the early 1900s, when telephones in houses were no longer oddities and motorcars were becoming richly lacquered works of art on wheels. It centers about Monsieur Ladmiral, a minor (and fictional) footnote in the world of art. (It is the major film debut of the brilliant Louis Ducreux, but that is a story all in itself.)

Decades before, Ladmiral has been passed over as his compatriots Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne and Monet surged ahead, each with his own decidedly unacademic vision. He is not without his honors, to be sure--France’s Academie was made for just such gentlemanly and faintly unimaginative pioneers. But on this afternoon of reflection with his daughter Irene (the glorious Sabine Azema), who loves her father as deeply as she knows true art, he says gently that he was a little afraid that if he’d “admitted what was original in others I’d have lost my own little melody.”

In Jean Renoir’s biography of his father, he reveals an extraordinary choice the painter made late, late in his life. A doctor had worked with him to bring life to his apparently paralyzed legs, and succeeded. Renoir stood, then walked for the first time in two years. Then he walked back to his invalid’s chair and surrendered to it, for life. “I give up. It takes all my willpower and I would have nothing left for painting.” Biographer Renoir then goes on to describe that his father’s last years of work after this immutable decision were “a display of fireworks to the end . . . freed from all theories, from all fears. His nudes and his roses declared to the men of this century, already deep in their task of destruction, the stability of the eternal balance of nature.”

It is not likely that Ladmiral will achieve this magnificence. But the will of the two artists may be equal. Tavernier suggests strongly a new determination to Ladmiral, a gentle fierceness as he faces his empty canvas at the end of the film. A last effort to recapture what his daughter saw in one of his very early canvasses may not be impossible. (It is only one of the film’s quiet strengths that what M. Ladmiral sets out to ponder in the rich shadows of his studio is not his early painting, but a fresh canvas--a far more pregnant ending.)

Within the press kit are the bare bones of a story no less dramatic, which throws light on “Sunday in the Country,” and on Tavernier himself. It has been discussed before in relation to the film, but it is no less worthy of retelling.

The book, “Monsieur Ladmiral Va Bientot Mourir,” from which Tavernier and his wife, Colo, adapted their screenplay, is by the late screenwriter/novelist Pierre Bost. It was Bost, in collaboration with Jean Aurenche, who wrote the screenplays for such memorable films of the ‘40s and ‘50s as “Gervaise,” “Douce,” “Devil in the Flesh,” “Symphonie Pastorale,” “The Red and the Black” and “Forbidden Games.”

With the arrival of New Wave critics like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, these established films from the “Tradition of Quality” were first held up to critical attack. And when the young-turk critics turned directors, and the mode of the day was the real location and the hand-held camera, Bost and Aurenche as well as the school they represented were regarded as culturally unacceptable.

Bost did not work on the screen again until the early 1970s, when Tavernier used him and Aurenche to adapt a Georges Simenon novel into the screenplay of his first feature, “The Clockmaker.” Bost’s short treatment was used by Aurenche as the basis for “The Judge and the Assassin,” and Aurenche and Tavernier collaborated on both “Let Joy Reign Supreme” and “Coup de Torchon.”

Bost died in the mid-1970s. Aurenche, who will be 81 this year, is still working. But their story gives an extra bit of shading to this portrait of a man left behind as fresh movements have their day in the sun. And Tavernier, by his brave and unfashionable film sense, becomes a link to that golden age of French film that Americans (among others) are now rediscovering through the massive retrospectives mounted in New York and Los Angeles.

By a great piece of fortune, all of Tavernier’s feature films that preceded “Sunday in the Country” can be found now on successive Tuesday nights during the Nuart’s four-week salute to the French writer-director. The series just began with his authoritative first film, “The Clockmaker,” paired with “The Judge and the Assassin,” set during the Dreyfus Affair. But still to come is the scabrously funny and disturbing conundrum “Coup de Torchon,” and particularly “Let Joy Reign Supreme,” which is both a period film with the detail and beauty of “Children of Paradise” or Mnouchkine’s “Moliere,” and a Rabelesian political history. (The press-screened print of “Let Joy Reign Supreme” was washed out. The poignant irony and the performances by Phillippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Jean Pierre Marielle and Christine Pascal are intact, however.) All Tavernier’s films are worth searching out, since well before “Sunday in the Country” it was clear that he was an extraordinary talent, as well as a preternaturally mature one.

His gifts are a wide-ranging mix: Tavernier is a sardonic humanist, a crusader whose anger is remarkably balanced and evenhanded. He has built his own, impeccable stock company of actors: his “autobiographical” Phillippe Noiret, who has become known to Americans chiefly through Tavernier films; Jean Rochefort, who is the perfect foil to Noiret in both “Let Joy Reign Supreme” and “Clockmaker”; the less well-known but splendid Jean-Pierre Marielle, who plays a tragi-comic Breton Don Quixote in “Joy” and twins in the mordant “Coup de Torchon,” and the lovely Christine Pascal, exquisite as the Regent’s pet whore in “Joy,” ardently political in the contemporary “Spoiled Children.”

Those who saw Tavernier in action last fall in Telluride remember him as an ebullient champion of popular-to-pulp American books and movies, yet two of his own best films, “Let Joy Reign Supreme” and “The Judge and the Assassin,” are “period” pieces in which he has transformed historical events into actions of the greatest immediacy. (In the matter of his historical films, Tavernier has quoted the historian Michelet: “To deal with history, you have to unlearn respect.”)

In dealing with the witty, abrasive, intelligent and moving films of Bertrand Tavernier, respect may be an inescapable byproduct.