Bicycling With Moliere (15)

Directed by Philippe Le Guay

4/5

THE odd-couple film format has been the stuff of tragicomedy long before the hilarious bickering of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. 

It’s the complementary contrast par excellence, summed up in Moliere’s drama Le Misanthrope, his morality play on the manners of the degenerate 18th-century French aristocracy, embodied in the characters of Alceste and Philinte.

Philippe Le Guay’s delightful film  gives it a contemporary relevance. A loose adaptation of Moliere, it’s a satire on contemporary celebrity culture, all too often treated as the new artistic aristocracy.

  It combines  the wonderful acting skills of Fabrice Luchini and Lambert Wilson with the latter superb as the star of Doctor Morange, a fictitious equivalent to a US TV surgeon whose handsome screen persona has won him many women admirers.

He’s never allowed to forget his alter-ego, even recommending punters to see certain doctors as he has their number and they’ll be playing golf.

Not so fortunate is his old friend and compatriot Serge (Luchini) who’s retired, reticent and in self-imposed exiled on the stormy shores of the Ile de Re painting nudes. 

Gautier wants Serge to help him revive Le Misanthrope and hopes he can persuade him to play Philinte to his starring as Alceste, the misanthrope.

But Serge doesn’t want to play Sancho Panza to his Quixote. For once, he wants to play the lead and they finally agree to alternate in the roles.

The trouble is they have history, professional and personal, and different approaches to the play, with Serge’s craft shining through and opening him up to new possibilities.

The alternative is for Gautier to return to TV or find another foil, since he very much wants to return to his thespian roots. But it’s back to basics first. 

Enter an array of tropes, from ex-spouses to girlfriends and a porn actress who wants to be a star and assorted other women arriving as the the old rivalries resurface.

The coastal setting, with its attendant variable weather, proves a perfect background for these consummate actors to play out the extremes of their crotchety characters.

It is all about delivery and context, as when Alceste reveals a new humanity as he understands the dialectics of dialogue. 

Philinte informs him that he has “a great spite for mankind,” to which Alceste smilingly agrees that he has “a frightful hatred of it.”

It’s the way he tells ’em.