A sort-of movie review...

...Or how I went to a French movie and came away being happy that I'm living here and now. ;-)

Yesterday misagillian and I BART’d off to Berkeley to see The Duchess of Langeais (French, with subtitles). I wanted to see this movie because this review intrigued me:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/21/DD2SVLU25.DTL&type=movies

What I came away with were not so much thoughts on the movie itself but on how much I am an American living in the early 21st C. And not only am I an American, but I’m Californian, and a San Francisco Bay Area native to boot. I understood what was happening on an intellectual level in this movie, but at a deeper level I found the motivations of the film maker, the characters, and the story itself baffling.

The film is based on one of Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine stories, so right at the start you know the story is a product of its time. (No I have never read Balzac. My cultural breadth is not that broad.) On the one side you have the Duchess, Antoinette, who has societal games-playing so ingrained that she can’t not play the coquette, and the general, Armand, who at first glance is a shy social inept but who really is an ex-Bonaparte general used to victories and no quarter. (Armand is played by the son of Gerard Depardieu. It weren't the milkman, that's for sure...) She decides to flirt with him and get him under her ”power”, he vows that she will be his mistress, and dysfunctional shit ensues.

Now, I get that we’re seeing two people trapped in their own social training and personalities. She can’t not play games even when she wants to be emotionally honest. I didn’t get, however, what it was she was trying to get him to do. Did she always just want him around like an emotional lap dog or was she trying to tease him into taking her by force and therefore becoming her lover without her having to take any blame? If I knew more about the upper-class culture of 1820’s France this would probably be more clear. I have to wonder if French audiences would know this part. I’m assuming that we’re just supposed to accept that he becomes obsessed with her as a given of the story, although I couldn’t see the attraction. There was also a religious thread in there that I couldn’t really understand but I think would have been clearer if I were French. Something about comparing the more “atheist” Bonapartest view of (organized, part of the State) religion and the view/belief of the aristocracy and the Church.

So while I thought the movie was a somewhat interesting peek into the early 19th C French aristocratic culture, I couldn’t find anything that I could relate to or draw from directly. My gut reaction was “Wow, those people are f—ked in the head!”. Granted, we in America the 21st C are subject to our own social/economic/whatever pressures and we have our own magazine-rack full of Issues. But we also have the luxury of living in a society where we have more access to and practice with Logic and Rational Thought and are able (within some limits, of course) live our lives accordingly. I may have my own personal angst that will never go away, but I get on with my life, for heaven’s sake. And, as Americans, we believe at a cellular level that you can Make Things Better, that you can break out and move on to another life. To overreact and destroy your life is not considered tragically inevitable but a terrible waste.

OK, feeling proud to be an American. I think I’ll go think about the upcoming election and then go shopping. ;-)