The Princess of Montpensier (Four Stars)

France: Bertrand Tavernier, 2010  (MPI Home Video)

The Princess of Montpensier is a splendid French historical drama, a movie in the tradition of  sumptuous, intelligent epic-makers like Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, or Jean-Paul Rappeneau — and of course, in the best tradition of the filmmaker who made it, the usually good, sometimes magnificent Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de Tourchon, A Sunday in the Country, Life and Nothing But).

Adapted by Tavernier and his writers, Jean Cosmos and Francois-Olivier Rousseau, from a lesser-known novel by the celebrated aristocrat/authoress Madame de La Fayette, this film is a rich, emotional, supremely intelligent work — a passionate romance, a penetrating political critique, ad a rousing adventure story. And though the novel from which it’s based is lesser known that La Fayette’s “The Princess of Cleves” it’s a work of genius all the same, immaculately imagined, seething with passion.

The story is a romance set during the Wars of Religion in 1562, and involving real historical figures — most prominently Marie, the Princess of Montpensier (played by the stunning Melanie Thierry), and the four prominent men, all real historical figures (like Marie) who love and vie for her: her idealistic soldier-husband, The Prince of Montpensier (Gregoire Lefrance- Ringuet); the womanizing seducer whom Marie loves, the Duc de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), De Guise’s friend and another fatal charmer, the Duc d’Anjou (Raphael Personnaz), and, perhaps the most interesting character in the film, the older pacifist soldier/scholar, the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), the shining, trustworthy idealist to whom the Prince entrusts his Princess — but who falls in love with her as well.

Madame de La Fayette, who was somewhat inspired by a different set of events in her own century, knows this milieu, knows these high desparate romantic and political stakes. And so do Tavernier and writer Cosmos, through artistic empathy. All the acting is superb, all the writing admirable, all the visuals rich and beckoning.

French artists, both literary (Stendhal, Flaubert) and cinematic (Carne-Prevert), are adept at anatomizing l’amour, at giving us a almost scientific analysis of the ways of love. Tavernier’s film shows us distinct varieties of passion, from pure to lusty, from analytical to overwhelming. But he also shows us the world of that time, immerses us in its sights and sounds.

And Tavernier gives us the people as well as their history. Francois Truffaut once complained of the pomposities and pretensions of the French “Cinema of Quality.” Young Turk of a critic that he was, he probably exaggerated. Indeed, in later years, Truffaut apologized to many of the cinematic elite, such as Julien Duvivier, whom he had critically bludgeoned in his youth.

He was talking against then, films like The Princess of Montpensier. But surely the quality Tavenrier gets here is nothing to ridicule or assault. Tavernier is an auteur, but he is also a filmmaker of quality, of the first rank, and The Princess of Montpensier is a film no fan of French film, or of art film, or of historical film, or of lusty full-blooded romance and adventure, should miss. Movies were made to give us experiences like this. So was Bertrand Tavernier. (In French, with English subtitles.)

Other Co-Pick of the Week (New):

 The Tree of Life (U.S.: Terrence Malick, 2011) Four Stars (20th Century Fox)

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