A film about love and art, about passing time and time passing, Fauteuils d'orchestre is a humble pleasure. The modesty feels intentional and misleading: the story is a nominally light affair abuzz with minor incidents, comic faces, choreographed nonsense, melodramatic blips and swells. But there are serious complications too, including a handful of characters facing life-altering decisions. On the face of it the film recalls the light comedies of what the French call boulevard theater, which were meant to entertain well-heeled patrons but at times, as with Fauteuils d'orchestre, also offered more.
The film opens once upon a time with an old woman's trembling reminiscence wafting across sweeping images of Paris as touristic and familiar as they are blissful and true. "I always loved luxury," she tells her granddaughter, Jessica (Cecile de France), but the closest she ever came to it was working at the Ritz Hotel. Jessica eagerly follows her grandmother's lead: she goes to Paris, lands a waitressing job at an Avenue Montaigne cafe and promptly presses her nose against the glamorous, creative bustle around her. Like us, she is only a visitor to this exclusive realm filled with wondrous talent and expensive habits, a realm that - much like Paris itself - is alive with its own mythologies.
The director Daniele Thompson wrote the screenplay with her son, Christopher Thompson, who has a double role in the film as collaborator and actor. He plays the part of Ingratitude, also known as Frederic Grumberg, the dour, seemingly unloving son of a self-made man, Jacques (Claude Brasseur), who's about to divest an important art collection. With his gruff, gravelly voice, which sounds as if it emanated from deep inside his body, then rolled around inside gathering force, Jacques still sounds like the taxi driver he once was (a man of the streets, as it were) before good luck and fortune intervened. With his health problems, a beloved dead wife and a beautiful young mistress, he plays the part of Experience.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF JOINT
Everyone has a role to play in Fauteuils d'orchestre as well as his or her own stage. Jacques speaks most of his finest, most touching lines from inside an auction house that has been coyly arranged to look like his home, complete with matrimonial bed, side table, lamp and casually arranged masterpieces - a Brancusi here, a Braque there. Right next door to the gallery is a concert hall where a famous pianist, Jean-Francois (Albert Dupontel), is losing his faith - in his life, his marriage and maybe his art. He plays Doubt (and Tortured Artist), while his increasingly unhappy wife, Valentine (Laura Morante), who manages his professional obligations, struggles to hold on to her dual role as True Believer and Muse.
There are other actors, other roles, other stages, all of which eventually intersect, or at least brush up against one another, like passers-by on the avenue. Initially the most abrasive player is Catherine Versen (the wonderful Valerie Lemercier), a television star preparing for a role in a theater that sits cheek by jowl with the concert hall. With her galloping self-regard and goofily dramatic gestures, Catherine registers as the very incarnation of the actress as professional narcissist, despite the flakes of croissant tumbling down the front of her shirt. Even her ductile face, which scrunches and bunches with each word, eyeballs rolling like marbles, mouth twisting into tight bows, then expansively releasing, appears designed for maximum attention. She is the ridiculous woman, the frivolous actress, the Fool.
Given the film's good-natured vibe, it really should come as no surprise that Catherine turns out to be more appealing than her sometimes bad cafe manners suggest. Thompson seems to be having some fun at the character's expense when Catherine amusingly blunders an introduction to a famous film director played by the famous film director Sydney Pollack. Pollack's character, Brian Sobinksi, is in Paris preparing an alarming-sounding new film about Simone de Beauvoir; the sultry sexpot Monica Bellucci, for one, is said to be up for the lead. Seated in the cafe that serves as the film's and the avenue's hub, he proves too busy to notice Catherine, who is on her way to rehearsals for a boulevard comedy by Feydeau.
The real Avenue Montaigne is on the Right Bank in a tony neighborhood near the Arc de Triomphe and far, geographically and otherwise, from the working-class suburbs that uneasily ring Paris. Like the film itself, the avenue is peopled by privileged, white Parisians whose lives seem untouched by the turmoil that has recently rocked the nation and dominated the news. It would be easy to dismiss the film for its lack of heft, for the deaf ear and blind eye it has apparently turned to the world, but only if you mistook this self-conscious fairy tale for a slice of realism or forgot about Jessica. Fauteuils d'orchestre is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.
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