March '21 Digital Week IV: RIP, Bertrand Tavernier

Blu-ray Release of the Week 

Bertrand Tavernier’s Journeys Through French Cinema 

(Cohen Media)

When Bertrand Tavernier died on March 25, the film world not only lost one of its greatest directors but also one of the very best cinema historians around. Proof of that has just been released on Blu-ray: Journeys Through French Cinema, an eight-hour series in which Tavernier discusses many of his favorite French films and filmmakers in his usual engaging and thoughtful style.

In 2016, Tavernier created My Journey Through French Cinema, a 190-minute, deeply personal chronicle of what most moved him onscreen since he became besotted with movies in his youth, growing up in Lyon and later when he moved to Paris. It was done so beautifully, so charmingly, so admirably that I wished it would go on for several more hours. Now, with Journeys Through French Cinema, my wish has been granted: over eight one-hour episodes, Tavernier dives even more deeply into his favorites over six decades of movie watching, starting with two episodes’ worth of “My Go-To Filmmakers,” those directors who have influenced Tavernier, both personally and artistically. He even goes so far as to ingeniously pair two cinematic giants most wouldn’t think to link: Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. (He also does the same, more questionably to my mind, with the great Sacha Guitry and not-so-great Quentin Tarantino.)

For the remaining six segments, Tavernier passionately guides the viewer through his own prism of French film history, from the great film composers and those directors who worked during the Nazi occupation of France, to those films made after World War II until the coming of the New Wave, through the final section “My Sixties,” during which Tavernier became a film press agent and was able to promote those films and filmmakers he especially admired.

For lovers of French film such as myself, it’s always a pleasure to see such wonderful scenes from classic films by Raymond Bernard (whose 1934 Les Miserables is, at nearly six hours, the most thorough and impressive adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel), Sacha Guitry (whose witty and boisterous comedies of manners are always a treat) and Henri-Jacques Clouzot (whose classic thriller, 1953’s The Wages of Fear, remains indelible).

As always with Tavernier—who, the handful of times I spoke with him, was a font of knowledge, enlightened conversation and natural friendliness—there are priceless anecdotes, brilliant insights and treasured observations: there are many moments during these eight hours when Tavernier’s passion comes through so forcefully that you feel his warmth, his embrace, his unique personality attuned to all things cinematic.                         

A Sunday in the Country

As for Tavernier’s many films—he made 22 features, from 1973’s extraordinary debut The Clockmaker to 2013’s satirical The French Minister, along with a handful of other documentaries, including his shattering four-hour exploration of the French-Algerian War’s effects, 1991’s The Undeclared War—where to start? I’d start with A Sunday in the Country, his exquisite 1984 chamber drama about a day in the life of an aging minor painter whose dutiful son and family come to visit, along with his frivolous (and single) daughter, and the unfair realities of existence—the old man is indifferent to his son but adores his daughter—are shown in all their hilarity and heartbreak, scored to the luminous chamber music of French master composer Gabriel Fauré. It’s available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, with a typically listenable Tavernier audio commentary.

Another way to see several more superb Tavernier films is the Criterion Channel, which is streaming

"Directed by Bertrand Tavernier"
on the Criterion Channel

nine of his very best, most characteristic films under the title “Directed by Bertrand Tavernier.” Alongside The Clockmaker and A Sunday in the Country are the beautifully realized intimate character study, 1980’s A Week’s Vacation; the forceful crime drama, 1976’s The Judge and the Assassin; the acidic black comedy, 1982’s Coup de Torchon; and the incisive, potent antiwar chronicle, 1996’s Captain Conan. 

So start somewhere, anywhere, and enter the singular and unforgettable cinematic universe of Bertrand Tavernier, which has a richness rarely equaled by any other director.

Passionate History

Wilson and Thierry in The Princess of Montpensier

The Princess of Montpensier
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
Written by Bertrand Tavernier, Jean Cosmos and Francois Olivier-Rousseau
Starring Melanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Gaspard Ulliel, Raphael Personnaz

Bertrand Tavernier’s superb historical drama The Princess of Montpensier is an artful, exuberantly visceral adaptation of a 17th century French short story by the Comtesse de Lafayette, expertly and adroitly expanded by Tavernier, Jean Cosmos and Francois Olivier-Rousseau into a tough-minded but ultimately heartbreaking love story.

A title card announces the year 1567, which thrusts us into the midst of the French religious wars between the Catholics and Huguenots. The eponymous princess, beautiful, intelligent and independent, is not merely decorative, as most women of this era are. Betrothed to the Prince of Montpensier but in love with the Duke of Guise, she accepts her role as the Prince's wife while she tries to bury her simmering passion for the Duke.

The naïve and jealous Prince is close friends with the Count of Chabanes, his former mentor, whom we first see killing a child and a pregnant woman on the battlefield, which makes him decide to lay down his arms and stop fighting. When the Prince leaves for his frequent forays into battle alongside Guise and the Duke of Anjou (the future King Henry III), he leaves the Count to teach his wife the finer things, like Latin, poetry, proper court behavior, even stargazing. The tender, intimate scenes between the Count and the Princess underline his pining love for her, of which she is blissfully ignorant.

It's no spoiler to say that, eventually, all four men—Montpensier, Guise, Anjou and Chabanes—butt heads attempting to win over the Princess: but Tavernier is less interested in a straightforward soap opera than in showing how romantic passion destroys those consumed by it. It’s no coincidence that the story takes place in a brutal period of French history: the era's most infamous event, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre—in which Catholics butchered Huguenots, first in Paris, then throughout the country—is persuasively re-enacted, its savage butchery recorded offhandedly as it takes the life of one of the film's protagonists, making it even more unsettlingly effective.

Typically for Tavernier, The Princess of Montpensier dovetails the personal and the epic, as important historical events inform these people's very lives. Physical violence takes the form of both battlefield butchery and, in two very different sequences, swordplay between Montpensier and Guise: first a friendly competition, the second time in deadly earnest. There's also much emotional cruelty depicted in unspoken feelings and often selfish behavior of characters who trod a battlefield as intensely real and bloody as the ones claiming actual lives.

Tavernier completely eschews melodrama throughout, shooting his film as a seemingly improvised character study. Unlike the short story, which has little dialogue, the script gives these people a lot to say, and with such superb actors at his disposal, Tavernier's film becomes a whirlwind of articulate, witty conversation. As the Princess, the excellent Melanie Thierry—she of the bee-stung lips—has an offbeat beauty reminiscent of Michelle Pfeiffer in another costume epic, Ladyhawke. Lambert Wilson's Count is another of this reliable actor's accomplished portraits of quiet inner strength, also on display in Of Gods and Men. The trio portraying Montpensier, Guise and Anjou—Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Gaspard Ulliel and Raphael Personnaz, respectively—combines youthful bravado with more subtly rendered tact.

Philippe Sarde's music, comprising low strings, woodwinds and a battery of percussion, is one of this veteran composer's most propulsive and exciting scores. The brilliant widescreen cinematography of Bruno de Keyser, a long-time Tavernier collaborator, is equally stunning in the expansively dramatic battlefield long shots and the hand-held camerawork that takes the pulse of these characters at close quarters.

The passions contained in The Princess of Montpensier mirror the impassioned filmmaking of Bertrand Tavernier, a filmmaker who never hides his affection for the flawed, ordinary, all too human characters he records for posterity.