Cinema
Déj a view
Peter Ackroyd
Sunday in the Country (PG', Chelsea)
And as the first words resound - 'When will you stop asking so much of life, Irene?' - one knows that the mood will be one of haunting, or perhaps halting, melancholy; and then the screen is suffused with autumnal colours in a composition which those who like chocolate boxes might describe as 'painterly'. We are in a French house, for this a French film, of which the sole inhabitants are a forgetful old man and his devoted female servant. As she gently remonstrates with him, the audience know that it is time to lean back in the comfortable seats of the Chelsea Cinema and be touched (if not necessarily stimulated) by one of those warm, human films of which the sentimentality is camou- flaged by perfect realisation - and also, in this case, by a narrator who explains to us those subtleties which, for some reason, the director and actors cannot show.
The elderly man is a painter, now living in rural seclusion, whose children and grandchildren are about to visit him in one of those familial acts of piety which are more consoling in anticipation than in experience. His son and daughter-in-law have no real understanding of their father's work, and their bourgeois plumpness is in marked contrast to his melancholy thin- ness. His daughter, Irene, is more vibrant and 'modern% she smokes cigarettes in a wilful manner and drives a car - by the standards of 1912, the year in which the film is set, these are signs of an artistic personality. But even she does not seem to understand her father's devotion to his art and, almost as soon as he has explained to her his sense of failure, she rushes back to Paris and her lover. And the film ends as the old painter stares at a blank canvas, which might indeed be his own history.
Selfish, or at least careless, children have been the staple of fiction for many years; as a result elements of caricature creep into their portrayal here, even despite the valiant attempts of all concerned to act in an intimate manner. The only really in- teresting personage is the father — the failed painter who has seen his contempor- aries stride in front of him, but who has remained faithful to his own somewhat limited vision. But the elegiac tone of the film is such that the private history and sentiments of the man are thrown away in a more generalised attempt to create a tab- leau of 'life' itself (complete with soldiers and rustics dancing in a small café, a scene which had clichés stamped all over its pastel shades and nostalgic music): some French directors seem to wallow in 'life' like crocodiles in mud. The fact that the central character is an artist may be justi- fication enough for the number of paint- ings upon which the camera dwells loving- ly, but I suspect that the director, Bernard Tavernier, is making a point — or rather an analogy — all too clearly; but he cannot seriously expect an audience to see his film in painterly terms (even if, with a certain oblique modesty, he is comparing himself to the somewhat conventional painter): the relation of film to painting is like that of newspaper to book.
The best aspects of the film are, in any case, of a less theoretical or elevated kind since they subsist in the comedy which is to be found in the behaviour of close relations who do not understand one another; but, even in this area, a short story is capable of more subtle analysis. What film can do is suggest relationships through physical ex- pressiveness, and Sunday in the Country manages this with a certain aplomb particularly in the sardonic sprightliness of Louis Ducreux who plays the father. He is a stage actor who, at the age 73, makes his first film appearance here — and puts to shame those old titans such as Katharine Hepburn or James Stewart who are over- bearingly cinematic in their speech and mannerisms.
The film, then, evokes a general atmos- phere — the horrifying oppression of Sun- days even in France, where the slow passage of time confirms the sense of lives continuing without much point. Time it- self, and the inflictions of memory, are also part of the theme but they are employed here only to bolster the general sense of sadness and regret which is so popular with cinema audiences. The nostalgia is manu- factured partly by sentiment and partly by wistful comedy — qualities emphasised by the glowing colours and the slow, painstak- ing direction which those addicted to im- precise adjectives will describe as 'lyrical' or 'reflective'. I was not entirelycon- vinced, however, since it is much easier to resist such blandishments when they are made egregiously seductive. It is not, in the end, a particularly interesting or inventive film; because it relies upon the evocation of some standard emotions, there is more than a vague sense of déjà vu; and if it provokes faint tears, it is only because it is suffused with the faint but unmistakable odour of an old French onion.
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