‘Moliere’ departs from the script of his life

ANYONE looking for a cradle-to-grave biographical drama of seminal French playwright and actor Jean-Baptiste Poquelin may well want to avoid “Moliere,” which opens Friday. The fanciful comedy-drama is actually more of an anti-biopic, because it is entirely a figment of writer-director Laurent Tirard’s vivid imagination.

Biographers of Moliere, the name Poquelin adopted as his nom de plume, have frequently discussed mysterious absences during his early years as an actor and playwright. One such time was in 1644. Moliere wasn’t even 22, but he was already starring and producing his own plays. He wasn’t financially successful, however, and was imprisoned for a while for his debts. After serving time, he suddenly disappeared for several months.

“Moliere” examines what might have happened during that gap in his life when his whereabouts were unknown. In a sort of Gallic “Shakespeare in Love,” Tirard offers his explanation of how the plucky young playwright found the inspiration to write his famous play “The Misanthrope.”

“It’s very funny,” Tirard says. “I wasn’t a big admirer of Moliere. Like everybody, I studied him in school and hadn’t found it that interesting at the time.”

But three years ago he decided to read “The Misanthrope” again. “It struck me how brilliant it was, how amazingly wrong I was about him and how contemporary he was.”

The difference? Tirard was older this time. “I was 17 when I first read ‘The Misanthrope,’ which is basically about depression. It is a play about strong moral ethics and struggling with the reality of that in society. When you are 17, that doesn’t mean anything. But when you are 40 when you read it, you have experienced that.”

With renewed vigor, he tackled Moliere’s comedies. “I wanted to adapt them all,” he says. “But I wasn’t going to do 15 movies. I realized I had to come up with a project that allowed me to take everything I liked from Moliere and put it into one movie.”

The melting-pot plot would feature Moliere as the central character with a supporting cast of characters from his plays. “I thought it was poetic and playful,” he says. “I didn’t want to talk about Moliere the person, but Moliere’s plays.”

Romain Duris (“The Beat That Skipped My Heart”) plays the carefree, sexy Moliere, who finds himself bailed out of prison by the wealthy and silly Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini). In exchange for getting rid of his debts, Moliere has to coach Jourdain in wooing a beautiful young widow.

Because Jourdain is married and has a teenage daughter, Moliere pretends he’s a priest called Monsieur Tartuffe in order to deflect suspicions over his real reason for being at the house. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Moliere to fall deeply in love with Jourdain’s wife (Laura Morante).

Tirard reports that his reinvention of his country’s national playwright met with divided feelings. “Actors tend to love it because to them it says a lot [about their craft] and captures the essence of Moliere,” he says. Literature teachers also liked it. “We went to show the film in schools and they thought it was a great way to make Moliere accessible to children. It’s very difficult to make 15-year-olds get interested in Moliere.”

But some of the cultural elite reacted angrily. “There were some who despised the idea and there were some who didn’t get the joke,” Tirard says. “History teachers ... to them it is all about historical facts and the truth, so they didn’t understand me taking such liberties and reinventing everything.”

susan.king@latimes.com