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The view of the chimera is a lesson from Welles, "sometimes you have to dream about him." Glitter and bluff of "Alexandre of a Thousand Names," financier, swindler, nation-destabilizer, Jean-Paul Belmondo restless in pin-striped suit with lapel carnation. Thirties France is just the Art Deco playland for a hedonistic nomad, he floats from luxury to luxury with chic wife (Anny Duperey) and forged bonds. "I operate entirely on credit!" Casino habitué, theater patron, juggler of politics and media and police. A chummy riddle to the rightist Baron (Charles Boyer), a definition of madness to the private physician (Michael Lonsdale), a case to be cracked to the tenacious inspector (Claude Rich). Above all a blur of braggadocio and opaqueness on stage rehearsing Giraudoux with a Jewish refugee (Silvia Badescu). "Playing a specter should suit me." The Stavisky scandal and its many ellipses, the man faceted like a diamond by Alain Resnais in a mellifluous historical reverie. For the breeziest of gangsters, fascists on the horizon are merely potential investors. "I frequent those in power." He hops on a tree stump to proclaim his affinity with the Macedonian emperor, and misses the dead squirrel by his feet. (He does later see himself in the ermine burrowing into the snow outside his cabin hideout.) His opposite number is the exiled Trotsky, his allegory of choice is Coriolanus at the Comédie Française. Virtually a lost Sacha Guitry bauble, a barbed foxtrot set to Stephen Sondheim's bittersweet strings. (The unexpected formal linchpin is Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.) Distorted reflections on polished steel, the cigar in the creamy dessert, the champagne glass shattering at last in the bloody hand. Eulogy for illusion and premonition of Vichy, "la mort d'une époque." Rosi's The Mattei Affair fills the other half of the double bill. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny. With François Périer, Roberto Bisacco, Pierre Vernier, Marcel Cuvelier, Jacques Spiesser, Michel Beaune, Niké Arrighi, Raymond Girard, François Leterrier, Niels Arestrup, and Gérard Depardieu.
--- Fernando F. Croce |