On Screen
MORRONE, JOHN
On Screen TELLING TALES BY JOHN MORRONE What you might forget after seeing Michel Deville's La Lectrice (literally, "The Reader") is that it is acomedy. For despite a fleet, feathery...
...Marguerite Duras' L'Amante is chosen for a torpid, anxiety-ridden executive (Patrick Chesnais), who craves Marie's affections...
...Set in Provence, La Lectrice (based on a novel and stories by Raymond Jean) recounts the experiences of Marie, a woman "gifted with a pretty voice," after she decides to hire herself out as a professional reader...
...Then the demand of a sly magistrate (Pierre Dux), anxious to undo Marie by proving she is a kind of literary panderer, succeeds...
...Thus, she helps the general's widow hang politically provocative banners from a to wnhouse window, agrees to lift her dress before the smitten Eric, sleeps with the businessman, and mothers the child whose own parent becomes jealous of Marie's charms...
...Leitmotifs, taken from Beethoven sonatas, are established for most of the principals, and domestic settings for the reading appointments are assigned a distinctive color, omnisciently underlining the mood struck between Marie and her listener...
...All this would be confining or overdetermined were it not for the element of inquiry, the expeditionary flavor, Deville attaches to La Lectrice...
...Reading is fine," they say, "but look where it leads...
...Marie is played with poise, generosity and good humor by Miou-Miou, who in keeping the character open and ebullient throughout prevents the necessarily episodic film from seeming choppy...
...For he has given us that rare thing, a deft symbolic comedy...
...It dawns on Marie, too, that her associations with her clients have begun to influence the texts she selects, and that she is no longer an impersonal conduit for literature but a living medium with extraliterary functions...
...Although the ending is downbeat, La Lectrice remains a gentle, hospitable film, elegantly observant of the pleasures and pitfalls of communication...
...To her, Marie reads from Marx on the form and usages of precious metals...
...Requested to dispassionately read a brutally erotic passage from the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Marie falters and, saddened by her inability to dissociate herself from the embarrassing, explicit text, realizes she must discontinue her service...
...Only David Mamet's House of Games (with its multilayered plot and incantatory dialogue, forcing us to listen not to words as they are said but to the deceptions beneath them) springs to mind as an equivalent achievement, sensitive to the netherworld of language and action...
...Marie's initial client is a young man, Eric (Roger Royer), watched over by his mother since he was crippled in a traffic accident...
...Perhaps he will do better this time around...
...For despite a fleet, feathery tone, this film is hardly a featherweight affair...
...Rumors about Marie eventually come to the attention of the police, who are suspicious of her unusual profession...
...Deville, co-writer of the script with his wife Rosalinde, defines each situation not only through characterization but by image and music...
...Beyond the power of words used to relate a story there is the unpredictable tension created by the listener, who identifies—sometimes even confuses—the tale with the teller...
...Unwillingly celibate, Eric listens to Marie read Guy de Maupassant's "The Hair" while watching the slit of her skirt idle up her thigh...
...And to a neglected six-year-old (Clotilde DeBayser) Marie recites Lewis Carroll...
...He bids us to consider the act of storytelling, and suggests that the heart of communication is less in what is actually said or written than in what is felt or interpreted...
...The preoccupations of a second client, a Hungarian general's widow (Maria Casares), are entirely different...
...At first merely a visitor in a series of strange houses, she has little idea how her role as storyteller and communicator will be subtly altered when her respective charges transform her into friend, confidante, mother, lover...
...Admired in France but underrecognized in the United States, Deville failed to attract an American audience with his stylish 1984 thriller Death in a French Garden (Péril en la demeure...
...Where Mamet's approach is dry and mysterious, however, Deville's is wry and sportive...
...It is, rather, an uncommonly literary movie about a decidedly serious person who enjoys reading aloud—not the most obviously cinematic subject—but its high spirits never flag, even if the ending is bittersweet...
Vol. 72 • April 1989 • No. 7
