MRS. SOFFEL & THE ARTIST

...contains some mystery...

...A spoken line over the initial blank screen — "You demand too much of life, Irene...

...The family theme and the art theme are merged in Tavernier's most brilliant change of pace...

...commerce, masculine and feminine roles in a conventional society — without cliches...

...The film focuses on a father — a retired painter who made competence, not creativity, the hallmark of his late nineteenth-century career...

...The movie was made on location at the antique Allegheny County prison, a masterpiece of Henry Hunt Richardson that one critic called "the most outstanding example of prison architecture in America...

...These people like each other...

...He first concentrates on the visit of the son and his family, a melange including two boisterous boys and a younger, frailer daughter...

...Tavernier scatters a few symbols about...

...Reds, Shoot the Moon, etc...

...He declined their lead, he says: it would have been unoriginal to have aped someone else's originality...

...With such slight shifts of tone, sequence, and angle, Tavernier prevents his period realism from becoming soporific, and creates a pace which allows his vignettes to assemble slowly to a full mosaic...

...Although the prison never becomes symbolic (for Mrs...

...It's such neglect of whole truths mat builds us right-wing prisons...

...Gibson, in turn, catches her self-destructive bug when he takes her with him on his perilous journey north...

...It is thoughtful, to be sure...

...everyone sees it, and the son hardly begrudges it, except when insisting, in a fit of pique, that his sister pay for the shawls...

...Soffel to document a fiercely independent gesture...

...At first glance, however, A Sunday in the Country may seem too slight, and I'll confess that I went (one Sunday in the city) with some trepidation, expecting perhaps, another pretty French film with period costumes where not much happens, another snooze-in-love...

...only later do we discover it was spoken to the daughter by the painter's deceased wife...

...Tavernier's neutral tone allows us to examine the issues — romanticism vs...

...Nevertheless, Tavernier does enough in the slow build-up of the tale to sustain dramatic expectation...

...Indeed, on closer look, Mrs...

...She affectionately assaults the place, unleashing her pet poodle ("Caviar"), embraces the girl in a vise, stirs up her nephews' precocious sexuality, and prods her father into an earnest search in his ancient attic for some old shawls for her trinket store...

...It looks the role, with its solemnity, heavy marble and granite, dim lighting, and iron doors whose gothic clink is here both convincing and scary...

...As a result, when they're caught, one hardly cares...

...More complicated is the tangle of relations involving the old man (Louis Ducreux) and his plain and somber son (Michel Aumont) and daughter-in-law (Genevieve Mnich): the latter resents his jesting at their seriousness...

...they reach out for each other and offer some level of understanding and forgiveness, but they miss each other too...

...Occasionally, Tavernier also substitutes a panning shot for a straightforward camera angle, and thus we are introduced to the artist's studio, a range of pretty trivialities without a dominant center...

...Soffel becomes a late Victorian Bonnie and Clyde, complete with gory, boring shoot-out...

...the only problem is that the thoughts come about ten years too late to do anything but annoy...

...instantly we divine she moves too fast, exactly the way she whirlwinds in and out of her father's life...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...We are told at one point that, although the father loves Irene the most, he resents her infrequent visits and ingratitude...

...Once she helps him escape, Mrs...

...Although based on a true story, the film's plot seems incredible — or at least incredibly naive in its countercultural assumptions about our sympathies...

...Instead, he labored modestly, followed the rules, and one notes — though he fails to add — wound up with a home in the country...

...The title character is a demure turn-of-the-century prison warden's wife (Diane Keaton) who visits prisoners to solace or convert them with Bible readings...

...Soffel explains why the last two decades have also brought both law-and-order and sexual backlash...

...What redeems the film somewhat is the cinematography...

...She is not in the least oppressed: her husband is mild-mannered and tolerable, her children charming...

...Soffel and the praise for it in some very high film circles — is its permanent, perhaps terminal, case of half-think on such subjects...

...belonging, adventure vs...

...The ideology behind the film, in short, isn't just passe...

...she also yearns to be close, and once runs up to help him as he walks unsurely, a gesture which is both awkward and perfectly genuine...

...Instead, a notoriously handsome devil of the period (Mel Gibson) lights her fire, and gets her to pass him handsaws between Psalms and Proverbs...

...To its credit, while registering the inadequacy of these children, A Sunday in the Country refuses to answer the question simply...

...The last two decades of witnessing the joys of martyrdom have apparently worn on my sympathy...

...The arrival of Irene (Sabine Azema) changes the tempo of the film and deepens the complexities...

...that doesn't mean pieties contain no truth or sacred value...

...But at the restaurant he expounds on his choice not to paint in an experimental manner...

...The delights of decon-struction are always much more seductive than creative faith...

...Periodically, Tavernier also breaks from his simple narrative by playing with time, with flash forwards as the son fantasizes his father's death, or flashbacks involving the dead mother, the "Rebecca" of the film...

...Tavernier's method, moreover, permits him to depict a variety of ways of existing in a family: growing old, growing up, exercising authority, being mischievous, feeling neglected, or craving attention...

...The film is a marvel of nuance and balance...

...So many issues congregate in this scene, a great family gathering of ideas...

...I was reminded most of Plato's Symposium, where he says artists are ' 'pregnant of soul'' and asks, "which would you rather have — natural children or the children of Homer and Hesiod...

...he is clear-eyed about the choice that he made and makes us wonder if, indeed, it was so bad...

...The only reason for Diane Keaton to Commonweal: 146 throw her life away is Mel Gibson's incredible hulk, which, literally, sweeps her off her feet, hardly a feminist pose...

...instead, it merely seems like willful self-destruction...

...He knew Renoir and Cezanne, he tells Irene, and neighbored Van Gogh "one summer in Aries...

...But Tavernier's method allows him to mine great riches from this simple source, treating, with an absolute evenness of tone, need and rejection, family foibles and fatigue, sentiment and ressentiment, ingratitude and bittersweet love...

...After staging all the action at the old man's estate, he has Irene take her father for a drive to a lakeside restaurant, where they sit and discuss an old painting they found among the shawls, his youthful and very romantic rendition of a girl on a tightrope, the only one of his works that Irene has ever really liked...

...it illustrates the knee-jerk assumptions still so prevalent among liberal intellectuals...

...The girl is seen, in a beautiful sequence filmed in the half-light of a country 8 March 1985:147 kitchen, laying strips of dough in careful lines across a patterned pastry under the guidance of the painter's crone-like housekeeper...

...As far as family is concerned, the structure of the plot implies that you really don't have to explain why someone would leave it: exits need not be justified because the filmmakers' ideology assumes that a family can't be justified in the first place...

...Long ago, Wordsworth wrote of such enlightened skeptics that they seem to prefer being "enemies to Falsehood than friends to truth...

...Keaton, for example, is far more believable as a lovestruck heroine than a Bible reader — in part because romantic suffering is her natural shtick (cf...

...In casually assuming that family and religion repress the self, they help foster approaches to family and religion which do...

...The story is as real as the setting (once nicknamed "Hotel Soffel"), but the screenplay doesn't make its heroine's recklessness convincing or admirable...

...His daughter — his Van Gogh, so to speak, compared to his son the academician — responds in character by leading him to dance...

...The father clearly prefers the daughter to the son...

...The old man pulls no neurotic "Andrea del Sarto" routine out of Browning...

...but in part, one suspects, because neither she nor director Armstrong really believes that reading the Bible could be a heartfelt act or anything more than a mindless pose...

...Director Gillian Armstrong has positioned her cameras to make sure that each frame is filled with bars, preferably several rows, to accentuate enclosure...

...To be sure, religious and family pieties—like prayer itself— may seem false or hollow when imposed as routine or adhered to mindlessly...

...Tavernier understates the artistic theme at first, and concentrates instead on the painter's family: a dutiful, plodding son and a romantic, unpredictable daughter who, true to the title, show up at their father's country home one Sunday...

...The hubris of the intellectual left — perfectly illustrated in Mrs...

...So much for religion...

...Equally obvious, and somewhat painful, is his own evident ingratitude toward his son...

...In depicting both the generosity and inadequacy of such characters, Tavernier establishes their reality which — in memories of Sundays in the country or the city — may come to seem yours too...

...One powerful central image dominates: a bridge of sighs, modeled on Venice's, which links jail and court, and which is neatly and symmetrically crossed at the open and close of the film...

...Armstrong, who previously made My Brilliant Career, probably meant Mrs...

...Soffel makes her own predicament), its sheer visual power compensates somewhat for the story's shortcomings...

...The boys provide consistent, only slightly overworked slapstick as they chase innocent animals, wrestle, and scamper about...

...Irene.is first seen in crisply edited shots as she drives one of Paris's first fancy autos up some country lanes, disturbing their pastoral quiet...

...BY Contrast, Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country reveals much of what it means to belong to a real family...