MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Accompanist’ an Assured Piece of Filmmaking

The winter of 1942 in German-occupied Paris is especially brutal, and an awkward young woman of 20, clumsy in her heavy, utilitarian shoes, can be forgiven for moving uncertainly up an ornate hall stairway. But then a door opens and, like an apparition, a brilliant singer appears in recital, elegant and sophisticated in a shimmering, floor-length white gown. The younger woman is transfixed, utterly. In fact, it is not too much to say that in that moment she falls in love.

The singer is Irene Brice (Elena Safonova), a celebrated, self-confident soprano who lives a life of privilege almost unimaginable in wartime Paris. The woman in the policeman’s shoes is Sophie Vasseur (Romane Bohringer), a tentative pianist who has come to talk about a job playing for the diva, a situation that turns into a complex symbiotic relationship more intricate than either woman anticipates.

“The Accompanist” (selected theaters) is an assured and psychologically acute piece of filmmaking, as carefully done and beautifully mounted as the operatic pieces from Berlioz, Massenet and Straus Irene sings. And, like “Tous Les Matins Du Monde” and “Un Coeur En Hiver” before it, it uses classical music as a most effective counter-melody to its story, a way to delicately emphasize the several kinds of fatalistic love stories director Claude Miller and his co-screenwriter Luc Beraud have fashioned from Nina Berberova’s novel.

At first, for Sophie at least, there is no one in the world but Irene. A bit like Eve Harrington in “All About Eve,” she throws herself completely into the singer’s affairs, acting not only as accompanist but also companion, maid, even accomplice in her married mistress’s complex love life.

Though not oblivious to them, Sophie wants more than the surface luxuries of Irene’s life, she wants to become psychologically indispensable, to abandon her own drab existence and live her life through her more glamorous employer’s. Irene, for her part, genuinely cares about Sophie but only up to a point. With charming and characteristic frankness, she tells the younger woman that she will take nothing less than her complete devotion.

Sophie is willing, but given her own tricky personality, difficulties arise. She comes to realize how little of even Irene’s reflected glory comes her way, yet her growing irritation at her idol’s power seems to perversely increase her desire for even more closeness. Simultaneously jealous, adoring and complicit, Sophie’s relationship with Irene threatens to become a dangerous one, though it is much to “The Accompanist’s” credit that the sense of who is in most danger from what changes from moment to moment.

Complicating things even more are the other forces in Irene’s life. Besides her husband, Charles Brice (Richard Bohringer), a brash and secure businessman who many people feel has made his fortune collaborating with the Germans, there are Irene’s many suitors, the most killingly handsome being Jacques Fabert (Samuel Labarthe), a Resistance sympathizer. And there is the real world of the war, which finally but inevitably impinges even on Irene’s cloistered existence with unlooked-for results.

Director Miller, who apprenticed with almost every notable French director, most often with Francois Truffaut, has directed “The Accompanist” with a deft and classical hand, allowing nothing to stray out of place while not neglecting the measured but intense emotions that live under the film’s polished surface.

Though it is soprano Laurence Monteyrol who does the actual singing, Safonova and Romane Bohringer are exceptionally convincing both on stage and off, as is Romane’s father Richard (a veteran of everything from “Diva” and “Madame Bovary” to “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”) as Irene’s husband.

The younger Bohringer won France’s Cesar for most promising new actress for her much showier role in Cyril Collard’s forthcoming “Savage Nights,” but she is if anything more impressive and devastating here as a woman in the quiet grip of an unexpected passion. Believing that “life is elsewhere, outside of you, it rubs against others but passes you by,” Sophie’s attempt to change that becomes a visit to the wilder shores of devotion, a place no one leaves unchanged.

*

‘The Accompanist’

Richard Bohringer: Charles Brice

Elena Safonova: Irene Brice

Romane Bohringer: Sophie Vasseur

Samuel Labarthe: Jacques Fabert

Julien Rassam: Benoit Weizman

Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Claude Miller. Producer Jean-Louis Livi. Executive producer Jean-Jose Richer. Screenplay Claude Miller and Luc Beraud, based on the novel by Nina Berberova. Cinematographer Yves Angelo. Editor Albert Jurgenson. Costumes Jacqueline Bouchard. Music Alain Jomy. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG. Times guidelines: mature subject matter , including betrayal and infidelity.