Finding Life in a Little Melody

By RICHARD CORLISS

A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY Directed by Bertrand Tavernier Screenplay by Colo Tavernier and Bertrand Tavernier

An innocent eye, an intelligent heart: these are the gifts that nature bestows on her artists. As a painter of the second stature, Monsieur Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux) possesses each gift in decorous sufficiency. His eye captures moments with piercing clarity; his heart helps him appreciate their evanescence. For old Monsieur is going to die soon. Now each day is unique--even this summer Sunday at his country home about 1912, when his children and grandchildren will come to visit, and memories will flip by like snapshots from a lost family album.

Nothing much happens in this gentle, acute, hugely affecting film from French Director Bertrand Tavernier (The Clockmaker, Coup de Torchon). Monsieur wakes, engages in a mild battle of wills with his sere housekeeper, dresses for the arrival of his son Gonzague (Michel Aumont). Gonzague's stern wife (Genevieve Mnich) lectures Monsieur fondly on his latest painting--"Put a cat on the divan; a cat is always nice"--and Monsieur replies with a smile that might be a wince. His two grandsons make an ordinary nuisance of themselves. His granddaughter, the lovely Mireille (Katia Wostrikoff), watches today's dinner spin on its fireplace rotisserie and gets caught up a tree. Suddenly, like a sunburst in the middle of a daydream, Monsieur's daughter Irene (Sabine Azema) motors in, abustle with gaiety and impish reproaches. She takes her papa to a country inn for a chat and one lingering waltz before nightfall; then, as abruptly as she came, Irene drives off to patch up a lovers' quarrel. Dinner, farewells, and a last reflection for Monsieur on his role as parent and painter.

In one sense, this is an unromantic, even radical film. The artist, it suggests, is also a functioning member of society. He need not be a diseased oyster or a frail hothouse plant or an emotional prairie fire that scorches the earth searching for truth. He must be both an observer of and a participant in the life of his family, his environment and traditions. And so, like any father, Monsieur can play favorites with his children, finding small pleasure in the weekly visits of his dutiful son, gasping for the breath of fresh life the mercurial Irene brings with her in her in frequent appearances. Like any grandparent, he can pamper or scold the little ones. Like any widower, he can surge into reveries of his dead wife, see her sitting in that chair, her chair.

Perhaps this explains Monsieur's failure, in his own eyes, as an artist. He was too faithful a family man, too attentive a student, too much a gentleman to renounce the academic style and strike out boldly for the terrain charted by the impressionists. "Perhaps I lacked courage," he confides to Irene. "I thought if I'd admitted what was original in others I'd have lost my own little melody." He is like a Salieri who has taught himself, through a lifetime of small disappointments, to accept that he will never be a Mozart. It is not till the end of this Sunday that he realizes the importance of following his own little melody. He puts aside his sofa still life, sets out a fresh blank canvas and ponders his resolution to start anew.

Bertrand Tavernier has done the same. Boldly eschewing fashion, he has found his roots in the French cinema's old tradition of quality, and found new life in those roots. Like the greatest painting the modest Monsieur could aspire to create, A Sunday in the Country is a masterpiece in miniature.

-- By Richard Corliss