Artists and Eccentrics

...the intersection of temperament and fate...

...Ladmiral is most human in comprehending the limits of his gift, much as he might want to push his lack of real distinction on to his son, or ascribe it to his late wife's restraining influence...

...The acting is nothing short of perfection, an instance of ensemble performing where no one gives the impression of desperately pretending to be part of the group (as everyone did in The Big Chill...

...Based on a novel, Monsieur Ladmiral Va Bientot Mourir, the movie is fittingly cast in a classic, almost Aristotelian mold...

...The love he feels for Irene, with her far-flung moods and dramatic clothes, symbolizes our affection for our own best capacities, that potential we may never have used fully yet have not given up on...

...The devoted Gonzague—his wife insists on calling him Edouard—stays to have dinner...

...He has again used the talented Norman Kaye, the winsome piano tuner of Lonely Hearts, and in a similar role: that of Charles Bremer, a moneyed recluse, a lover of beauty and culture...

...Cox' touch was so deft that we could not dismiss the eccentricities of these two lives as alien—his anxiety about his toupee popping off, her horror of physical intimacy—and were instead drawn into a kind of bemused circle of recognition...

...Still, in most respects ,4 Sunday in the Country excels...

...Since the new movie reflects a greater poise and formalism than anything else this director has done, it may disappoint those who have come to expect a certain exhilarating jaggedness of style...

...Lisa, far from being the delicate thing Charles imagines, schemes with her action-painter boyfriend to get the money his cocaine habit requires...

...he is far more concerned with following the track of his curiosity wherever it might lead...

...Once a week he pays Lisa, an artist's model (Alyson Best), to come to his house and strip to the"Love Duet" in Donizetti's Lucia Di Lammermoor...

...By the movie's end we are inclined to accord Ladmiral the dignity he appears to begrudge himself...

...He reports that she once explained the blurred quality of a Degas painting by saying, "That's nice but the model moved...

...Close your mouth...

...Perspiring gently in his three-piece suit, he looks all wrong in the eyes of his artist father...

...Louis Ducreux, who looks and acts a bit like the late Lee Strasberg, is particularly riveting in a role that might easily have fallen into caricature: His proud bearing and vanquished old man's amble poignantly suggest the artist's odd mixture of vanity and frailty...

...The directorial influence I do sense is that of the late Francois Truffaut—especially the Truffaut of Two English Girls, present here in the reliance on voice-over and, more generally, in the emphasis on a unifying method...

...Sunlight pours through the windows of Ladmiral's vast white-coated country house...

...Extravagant in gesture and reckless in love, she is the muse incarnate...

...the flies buzz...

...On the simplest level, A Sunday in the Country is a youthful tribute (Tavernier is in his early 40s) to senescence, an attempt to catch its pliancy as well as its weariness...

...Friends who have seen the movie have told me it reminded them of Ingmar Bergman, but even his most amiable sunset films strike me as much more clamorous...

...Of course—and this is the element that gives the figure of the aging artist a poignancy and resonance it might otherwise not have—Ladmiral is no genius...

...Irene departs in a flurry .Soon the day is over, and almost before the guests have departed—to return in two Sundays for an identical visit—Mercedes closes the shutters...

...Brian De Palma, for instance, will keep making fleshy thrillers having less to them than meets the eye because this niche has earned him a reputation of sorts...

...Charles is one of the walking wounded, dented out of shape by his childhood...

...In choosing to portray an elderly painter of not quite immortal gifts, Tavernier also leaves himself room to raise considerations that aren't strictly age-bound: the limits of vocation...

...His film of two years ago, Lonely Hearts— portraying the love affair of two misfits, a middle-aged piano tuner and a pretty, frightened spinster—had a gentle wackiness that was altogether appealing...

...His willingness to don a different directorial costume with each film has prompted the criticism that he is overly imitative and unadventurous...

...There is an absence of normality to set against Charles' maverick constructions on love and life...

...A lot of the individual lines are effective—"Imagination," declares Charles' art teacher, "is the word people use when they don't know what they're doing...

...there is a slightly forced sonorousness to the whole...

...Always eager to please, Charles hands over more than she requests, adding that she should "spend the change on something useful...

...Paul Cox is a rather assured director and Man of Flowers is not without power...

...A Sunday in the Country is the latest nonsequential development in Tavernier's ongoing series of exercises—as complete a departure from his previous effort, Coup de Torchon, as that was from its predecessor, A Week's Vacation...

...Dramatic interest takes second place to character construction and finely tuned observation...

...shot in underexposed black and white, they have the feel of ghostly home movies...

...there is a discussion concerning the living room chairs that need re-covering, though the old man likes the faded color...

...There follows a cacophonous fugue: Monsieur Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux), the artist, hums a tune while shining his boots, and Mercedes (Monique Chambette), his devoted but sullen housekeeper, hums an opposing one rolling out her pie dough on the kitchen table...

...Amid the clatter of cutlery and the clink of glasses it is la vie bourgeois in the fullest sense of that overused phrase, a life of small comforts and easy rituals: civilization and its contentments, swans gliding around a pond, and admonitions to the children regarding their table manners...

...He is an impressionist of some repute and, we are to understand, a more than adequate commercial success, but not a visionary, a Cezanne or Degas...

...As the film unfolds, Mercedes serves lunch and her chicken is praised...

...Tavernier, by contrast, seems not to fear the cumbrous nature of his medium: Film is to him the most wieldy of materials, infinitely adaptable to changes in his interests and style...

...It brilliantly depicts the ends of things—afternoons, meals, lives —and the process of creation, which is always nude and always young...

...Only minutes into the film we are firmly ensconced in a very particular 19th-century world, adroitly conveyed by aural and visual images...

...Cox' new movie, Man of Flowers, is unfortunately more of a curiosity than anything else...

...Toward Gonzague's lively youngsters the painter is resolutely undoting, mutterin to himself "I'm sure they'll break it," and casting dour looks as they romp around...

...The proper, responsible Gonzague has abandoned an early interest in painting to enter the solid world of commerce...

...Charles resembles a poem in need of translation...

...When son Gonzague (Michel Aumont) and his pious wife, Marie-Therese (Genevieve Mnich), arrive with their three children, we are immediately aware that Ladmiral sees his own insufficient nerve in his offspring...

...The action, such as it is, occurs in the course of a single day at the turn of the century...

...During the opening credits of A Sunday in the Country we hear children singing the French version of "Miss Lucy Had a Baby...

...But Tavernier is clearly not out to accommodate the expectations of even his most appreciative viewers...

...Buy orchids...

...It may in fact be less pleasing cinematically than intellectually, but since the vast majority of movies suffer from precisely the opposite problem, I trust I am praising with faint damns...

...The childhood scenes are wonderfully done...

...Not until his daughter, Irene (Sabine Azema), arrives does Ladmiral perk up...

...In several flashback scenes, we see him in his youth caught between the taste he has been given for fine things and the refusal of his harsh father (Werner Herzog) to let him exult in them...

...No elbows on the table...

...Ladmiral is the sort of old man who hasn't so much mellowed as become more of what he has always been— prickly and whimsical, given to striking a note of underlying disappointment...

...Given the expense and brouhaha innate to movie making, most directors understandably stick to a formula, a proven vision or close substitute...

...Although both his parents are dead, Charles writes letters to his beautiful and adored mother about his passion for the "little flower...

...the old man checks his pocket watch against the hour he will walk to the train station to pick up his visiting children and grandchildren...

...The ritual completed, he goes to the church across the street and spends himself in a burst of organ playing...

...The old man tells him that he calls to mind the color purple, then tries to soften the sly insult by adding, "Not everyone can have a purple son...

...The pieces somehow don't add up, however, perhaps because, unlike Lonely Hearts, Man of Flowers is wholly geared to the eccentric's viewpoint...

...Some viewers might be irritated by the film's very quietness, the way it floats among what Ladmiral calls "despetites riens," little nothings...

...The imperatives behind Cox' vision seem almost too private...

...By focusing on subtle, evanescent shifts of thought and feeling, the film absorbs you in a manner qualitatively similar to a good old-fashioned read...

...Irene's dog, Caviar, barks at shadows, and she takes her father in her newfangled automobile to the village tavern, where they dance...

...Paul Cox is an Australian director drawn to the solitary and the quirky...

...If I have any serious qualm about Tavernier' s latest effort, it is the unduly genial effect of this influence...

...What emerges is a film that is oddly soft, lacking edge...

...Tavernier seems to be working with an idea of harmony that feels imposed on occasion and doesn't allow any one scene to expand unexpectedly...

...Eat your carrots...

...I myself think the chameleon aspect of his method is both genuinely inventive and rare...

...why some are content to see the sun in its true colors, and others insist on coloring it green...

...Like sexual desire, old age is a mighty equalizer: It comes to the successful and the failed, the great and the average...

...Ladmiral is left alone to contemplate his perennial longings and regrets...

...A Sunday in the Country's attentive-ness to moments of time reminds me less of other movies than of Virginia Woolf s novel To The Lighthouse...