Arts
Past lives
Peter Ackroyd
The Return of Martin Guerre (`15', Curzon)
And also the return of Gerard Depar- dieu — although he has been away only momentarily; here he is again, as robust as ever, gnawing on chicken's legs and wiping his mouth with his hand, very much au naturel, with that bovine express- ion which has made him the toast of France (if he had not already become, in his 52 films, the European Community's own Acting Mountain). His skill is not to be underestimated, however: the quality which he brings to his performances may be as physical as a water-cannon, and threaten to blast everyone else off the screen, and yet it is mingled with a subtle and what would once have been called a `feminine' ability to subdue and thus man- ipulate his personality as a director wishes. And these qualities are all the more advan- tageous in The Return of Martin Guerre, which itself is in part about the mystery of human identity.
The film is set in mid-16th-century France, and has been adapted from a contemporary account (how much has been lost in the adaptation is another matter): Martin Guerre is a French peasant who, married at the age of 15, abandons his wife and young son soon afterwards; nine years pass, and then he walks back into the village as mysteriously as once he left. He is welcomed in an almost Biblical manner, however, and returns to his wife; he has two more children and becomes the village's only authority on the outside world, with the stories of his wanderings. But this happy life does not last. His uncle raises doubts about his identity: is he really the same man who went away as a boy, or is he an imposter who has taken Guerre's place? Once the question has been raised there seems to be no answer, and even his wife seems to have difficulty in resolving the problem; it takes several courtroom investigations in Toulouse to discover the facts of the matter.
It is an interesting case: the romance of the wanderer has been transposed to a pre-Romantic age, and there is an intri- guing possibility that the second Martin Guerre may be a wily confidence trickster or even, perhaps, a demonic doppelganger sent to confuse the peasants of France. The story is full of cinematic possibilities also: not only must Gerard Depardieu remain ambiguous enough to intrigue the audience in the Curzon Cinema (and posterity can be fickle), but there are ample opportuni- ties for romance and courtroom drama:
although the procedures of the 16th- century French judiciary may leave a lot to be desired, there was still apparently room for emotional reconciliations and surprise witnesses on an almost Californian scale. In fact the unravelling of the plot is so interesting that the historical context he' comes relatively unimportant; you may see this as a triumph or travesty, according to taste, but those of a scholarly disposition might find the dominance of such conven- tional cinematic virtues as suspense or surprise a poor substitute for proper histor- ical realisation.
No doubt the case aroused so much contemporary interest because it raises a number of issues — one does not have to be an anthropologist to realise that the question of Martin Guerre's identity touches upon a number of social and religious attitudes of great importance to a settled agricultural community. But the presence of Gerard Depardieu, and of Nathalie Baye as his wife (she is the china shop to his bull), ensures that the film will concentrate upon the 'emotional' possibili- ties of the story; and excessive sentiment, even of a marital kind, seems somewhat anachronistic. No doubt the maker of this film, Daniel Vigne, was nervous about what would or would not 'work' in the cinema; but this is a pity.
For, as a result, the film veers between costume drama and psychological thriller — a confusion which is not even resolved by the excellent performances throughout. Daniel Vigne has tried to render the historical narrative interesting by making it as contemporary as possible — which is not at all the same thing; he has also decided, along with so many of his colleagues, that our ancestors were very much 'like' us except that they were dirtier and had a more limited vocabulary (although, in the matters with which the film deals, their vocabulary was probably a good deal subt- ler than our own). He chooses to empha- sise the muckiness, the fleshiness of things: the whole world looks hot and sweaty, as if time itself were a small enclosed room into which we peer. But that of course is an illusion, and the product of a sentimentality which also revealed itself in the staging of 'pagan' rites which were too colourful to seem entirely real and in the depiction of peasants who were too jocose to be true. Why is it always assumed that mediaeval peasants laughed at practically anything? Roberto Rossellt- ni's The Rise to Power of Louis XIV was all object lesson in how to distance the past by recreating it in quite un-modern tern's,
even given the fact that the French court lends itself to ritualistic heightening in a way denied to French peasants, it is never- theless true that any film which wishes to suggest the past must in some way create it outside the terms of ordinary cinematic realism. However intriguing The Return of Martin Guerre is as a story, it lacks that oddity or mystery which would have brought it powerfully to life.
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