Cinema
Cheering up
Peter Ackroyd
Charles et Lucie ('A', Curzon)
Charles is an unsuccessful stall-owner in Paris; he has that rather crumpled look, both benign and worried, which middle-aged French actors seem naturally to adopt. His wife, Lucie, is a charlady who is both angry and bewildered at the fate which life has dealt her: 'This isn't living,' she says, 'this is enduring.' The face of Charles sags like an old coat. Both parts are very much in the tradition of French `character' acting; their performances go as far as possible towards comic exaggeration without losing their credibility, close to farce and not very far from sentimentality. It is a rhetorical style of acting which, in front of the camera if not on the stage, has learned to keep its flourishes in check so that loving endearments like 'My night- ingale!' are said with grandiloquence but also with conviction. It needs good perfor- mances, also and here Daniel Ceccaldi and Ginette Garcin are excellent.
The plot of Charles et Lucie is of the simplest. A pair of confidence tricksters in- form the couple that they have inherited a fortune but, first, they must provide a deposit to pay for legal fees. They sell all their belongings only to discover, of course, that they have inherited nothing. The car given to them by the thieves as a first in- stalment of their 'inheritance' turns out to be stolen and, thinking they are being pur- sued by the police, this fetchingly daft pair take to life 'on the road'. At once they are plunged into a picaresque world of adven- tures and misadventures: they meet a mad killer, drift out to sea, become involved in military exercises, see a magical vision. They learn to care for each other in the pro- cess and, by the end of the film, have even begun to enjoy their new life.
It is perhaps an old theme: a middle-aged couple, eccentric and slightly silly, alone against the world. They are a little sad, a little lost, and they cling to each other for support and affection. 'I forbid you to do it,' Charles tells his wife after a half-hearted attempt at suicide, 'I forbid you to leave me.' It is a plea rather than a command: they have nothing, but at least they can have each other. And slowly the nature of their love becomes apparent to them as they battle against an apparently hostile world.
Charles et Lucie is a very French film; it has a cheerful tune, all accordions and turn- ti-turn, and a peculiarly Gallic mixture of irony and romance. It is absurd and yet also very touching, combining sardonic observa- tion with sentimental vignette. So fluid a tone ensures, also, that the film can handle normally heterogeneous materials: the cou- ple's working-class life in a suburb of Paris, with which the film opens, is wonderfully evoked just as the scene of magical illu- mination — when they see a green light creeping off the sea and transfiguring the ordinary world — is done with such an unexpected grace that it takes the breath away. What unites these moods is, really, the unobtrusiveness of the direction what we have here is something as relaxed and as unselfconscious as a television play without the insistent coarseness of that medium.
The happy ending which marks the film is perhaps only to be expected; a comic world of this kind is a fragile thing, and it would be shattered beyond repair if reality obtruded too menacingly. But Charles et Lucie is flawlessly conceived within its limits. It achieves precisely what it sets out to achieve, without a false note or a wrong emphasis. All of its parts — the cinema- tography, the script, the acting — fit together so well that we have a seamless web of comic illusion, both lyrical and graceful. It is a film of great vivacity and alertness, an near-perfect exercise in the difficult art of cheering an audience up. It is, in that sense, very much part of the French tradi- tion of sentimental comedy — and those of us who struggled to the cinema through rain, faced with the prospect of no transport at the end of the evening, were grateful that such a tradition still exists and can work its own magic even in the recalcitrant setting of the late 20th century.
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