Cinema
Uranus (`15', selected cinemas)
The hunting of the nark
Harriet Waugh
Monsieur Archambaud, the most interesting character in Uranus, points out, how is it that under occupation the majori- ty of French people were for Petain, like himself, and now they would have everyone believe they were always for the Resis- tance? Like Louis Malle's film Lacombe Lucien some 17 years ago, Uranus tackles the uneasy subject of French collaboration during the war, but from a very different angle. In Lacombe Lucien you follow the wartime fortunes of a French peasant youth who first tries to join the Resistance and then, when rejected, throws in his lot with the German occupiers. It is a strong, emotionally complex film. Uranus, a mildly satirical comedy written by Marcel Ayme in 1947 and much criticised at the time by the French, starts at the point that Lacombe Lucien breaks off. It is set in a small French town in 1945. Much of the town, including the school, has been reduced to rubble. The communists hold power and the purge of collaborators is under way. To a lesser or greater extent most townsfolk have collaborated.
Monsieur Archambaud (Jean-Pierre Marielle), his wife and their pretty 18-year- old daughter and 16-year-old son are a thoroughly bourgeois family who live in a large flat, parts of which have been requisi-
tioned to give accommodation to people bombed out of their homes. Billeted on them is their friend Monsieur Watrin, the schoolteacher, who was buried alive in the debris of his home. Each night at the time the bomb fell he falls into terrible despair in which he sees the terrifying abyss of the planet Uranus, but in the morning he is always filled with an intense joy at being alive. Also living in the flat is the large fam- ily of a wartime Resistance hero, Monsieur Gaigneux, who is a leading communist in the town. This causes tension because Gaigneux is powerful and could have the Archambauds thrown out of their flat if he so wished. One evening as Archambaud takes his after-dinner walk he is accosted by Maxime Loin, a collaborator who had believed in the Nazi party and is now being hunted and if caught will be killed. Archambaud, against his own fears, possi- bly because he is conscious of his own minor collaboration in the past, consents to hide him, We are, after all, all hypocrites, he thinks. He takes him home. This pre- sents problems and much domestic comedy because of the presence of the communist in their midst.
Meanwhile the reverberations of the hunt for Maxime Loin bring tension to the town. The teacher Watrin holds his classes in the cafe/bar owned by Leopold (Gerard Depardieu), a bombastic, drunken anti- communist who is so transported by Watrin's teaching of Racine as to believe himself a poet. Much given to insults, he insults a railway porter, a new party mem- ber. In revenge the railway porter informs the communists that Maxime Loin is hiding out in Leopold's café.
There is much farce and ultimately tragedy in Uranus. Gerard Depardieu's rumbustious performance of the huge, uncompromising Leopold who was once a circus strongman is the magnetic centre of the film. Depardieu plays him magnificent- ly, but towards the end his dynamic energy and the reams of bad poetry that he has to spout become less funny and begin to pall, but no sooner does that thought occur than tragedy hits and there's an end to it.
The film is directed by Claude Berri of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources fame. In order to soften Marcel Aymes violent anti-communism (Berri's father was a communist) he, probably rightly, trans- forms Gaigneux into a good communist. Without demolishing the humour or the awfulness of what is happening (there are plenty of bad communists), it gives a bal- ance to the general contention of the film, which is that there are few totally villainous or heroic people in life but rather a great deal of moral cowardice, cupidity, malice and hypocrisy. There is, however, one vil- lain who seems to have darkness in his soul and that is the millionaire black-marketeer Monglat, but like all the other male charac- ters in the film he has a wonderful, sardon- ic French face.
I have not got room to say anything
about the three notable female characters but they are, like their male counterparts, splendid. Uranus is funny, warm-hearted and thought-provoking. Given what is hap- pening in East Germany with, topsy-turvily, those who co-operated with the communist regime being removed from their jobs and sometimes arrested, it is a very timely film. The subtitles are in American.
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