Had I not just seen Jean-Paul Rappeneau's (2003) genre-blurring "Bon Voyage" set in collapsing France of 1940, I surely would have found the comic tone of his 1966 movie "La vie de chateau" (The life of the chateau, literally, though the movie was released in English as "A Matter of Resistance: and as "Gracious Living," both ironic) strange. Neither the Nazi conquest nor Nazi occupation seem promising topics or settings for comedies. The screwball comedy of "Bon Voyage" recalls the great Ernst Lubitch "To Be or Not To Be" with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard and the Resistance in Prague. "La vie de chateau" turns out to be more like Jean Renoir's 1943 "This Land Is Mine" with Philippe Noiret in a version of the Charles Laughton seeming-patsy character, albeit at a higher social station.

In "La vie de chateau" Noiret (whose face always reminded me of a basset hound) plays Jérôme, whose sole concern seems to be with his orchards (apples and pears) in Normandy (Arromanches), close to the coast. He has a very restless wife, Marie (Catherine Deneuve), eager to live in Paris. Jérôme is concerned she would run wild there and he would lose her, and has secretly rented his Paris apartment.

The real boss of the very large chateau is Jérôme's mother Charlotte (Mary Marquet) a grande dame with a voice that carries and no inhibitions about using it. She had managed to keep the Germans off her land, but one day Lt. (I think) Klopstock sees Marie, is smitten, and billets his troops there so that he can pursue a romance with her.

She encourages him not in the slightest. Her beau is a dashing captain, Julien (Henri Garcin) in the Resistance, who is preparing for D-Day and goes back and forth to England. His mission is to reconnoiter for paratroopers to take out a coastal artillery battery, though he too is very smitten by Marie... and very contemptuous of her husband's quiescence both to his mother and to the Nazis.

The competition for her affection drives Klopstock, Julien, and Jérôme to heroics and idiocies (the two are more than analytically distinct!). More comedy is provided by the antagonism between her father Dimanche (Pierre Brasseur), who turns out to be the local Resistance co-ordinator (with the code name Vendredi -- that is Friday in place of his real name of Sunday), and her mother-in-law.

Although I did not think of it while I was watching "La vie de chateau," there is an American romantic comedy organized around D-Day, "The Americanization of Emily." The characters in it are American (can anyone be more American than James Garner) and British (Julie Andrews), whereas the characters in "La vie de chateau" are crafty rural French and absurd Germans (as so often in movies, easily outwitted and silly in various ways).

Deneuve's radiant beauty was natural in 1966 and it is plausible that all the men would be competing for her. I find the feistiness of "les parents terribles" (Brasseur and Marquet) funnier, and especially like the scene in which Jérôme takes charge of removing spikes the Germans have planted where the American paratroopers are going to land... and the last scenes. In fact the last quarter hour raised my rating from 3 to 4 stars.

Michel Legrand (in the "Umbrellas of Cherbourg" era) supplied lush romantic music. The black-and-white cinematography was shot by Pierre Lhomme, who later shot Rappeneau's "Le Sauvage" (1975) and "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1990); and also did memorable work on "Camille Claudel" (1988), "Ma Maman et la putain" (1973), "Homo Faber" (1991); and Merchant/Ivory films including "Maurice" (1983), "Quartet" (1981), and "Le Divorce" (2003). The scenes in a stone storage building and in the marshes are particularly hauntingly photographed. (I don't think that making Deneuve ca. 1966 look good was much of a challenge!)

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Now I need to see "Le Sauvage which pairs Deneuve with Yves Montand (almost as odd a pairing as Deneuve and Noiret!) and "Tout feu, tout flamme" (1982), which pairs Montand with Isabelle Adjani (who returned seemingly no older in "Bon Voyage"). Rappaneau coscripted "Zazie dans le Métro" (1960, which starred Noiret as a drag queen) with Louis Malle and, with Philippe de Broca, coscripted the deliriously funny 1964 Belmondo vehicle "That Man from Rio" and the less enchanting Belmondo spy caper "Le Magnifique" (1973). IMO "Le hussard sur le toit" (Horseman on the Roof, 1995, starring the genuinely dashing Olivier Martinez and the formidable Juliette Binoche) is Rappaneau's masterpiece. (At the time it was the most expensive French film ever made, and the money is, as they say, definitely on the screen.). "Hussard," "Cyrano" and "Bon Voyage" all combine comedy with derring-do and are the only three films Rappaneau has made since 1982. "La vie de chateau" was the first feature-length film he directed and there have only been a total of seven.

I think that seeing "Bon Voyage," made much later but set around the time of France's surrender before "La vie de chateau" set around the time of the Liberation is a better order than the chronology of Rappeneau's oeuvre.

I plan to write in praise of "Bon Voyage," too. Being largely forgotten, "La vie de chateau" is definitely a French find -- and a pleasing one to submit to Barbara's summer beach umbrella.

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




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