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The Dumas note is adduced at the very end in the image of the charred chariot, a rhyme with the flaming automobile at the very beginning of The Clockmaker. Brittany, 1719, a teeming panorama. Philippe d'Orléans (Philippe Noiret) is Regent, a humane voluptuary introduced awakening in the royal bedchamber, pan and zoom on a candlelit mirror reflection. "The King is a healthy little boy, and I'm an old cadaver." At the top an ongoing bash of knaves and clods in perukes, at the bottom penury and starvation and human cargo for the New World. L'abbé Dubois (Jean Rochefort) is a venal twit angling for a papal promotion, meanwhile the Marquis de Pontcallec (Jean-Pierre Marielle) organizes a quite doomed separatist coup, "une guerre de nobles." Remarkably, Bertrand Tavernier orchestrates all of this as risqué, sardonic farce, with a tumultuous gusto that tears through meticulous period recreations. Gold and church have their roles to play in the systems of opulence and rot, the ruler is busy with bordello slide shows and the rebellion is a sad pistol tied to a pitchfork. "If a pimp can be archbishop, a whore can be an abbess." Camera movement is continuous, so is the flow of jokes: Court tykes throw darts at oil paintings, the heroic fugitive ducks into a novice's bathwater, Brooks gleans a few ideas for History of the World: Part One. The Revolution is still half a century away, but traces of insurrection simmer enough for the bourgeoisie to recognize its own fragility—the Regent's last round of debauchery has a mock-pauper theme, a buxom attendee doffs her mask to reveal the grinning rubber skull underneath. "Once drawn, the wine must be drunk." Imamura's Eijanaika offers a complementary carnival of history. With Christine Pascal, Marina Vlady, Alfred Adam, Jean-Roger Caussimon, Gérard Desarthe, Michel Beaune, Monique Chaumette, Jean-Paul Farré, and Nicole Garcia.
--- Fernando F. Croce |