Debauchery in the drawing room
Robert Pattinson is the seducer of a classy cast of willing mistresses in a faithful literary adaptation.
The great director Robert Bresson refused to use professional actors in his films, preferring instead to cast a previously unknown “model” for each new part.
It was partly because he detected inevitable falsity in even the most accomplished actor but partly also for the simple reason that he thought stars recognisable from previous roles could never be fully credible as another character. Sometimes, though, that crossover can be used profitably.
Bel Ami is an adaptation of the novel by Guy de Maupassant published in 1885, when Flaubert’s protégé was 35, at the height of his success, literary, financial, sexual and social, but already afflicted by the syphilis which killed him just six years later.
The novel depicts the rise in Paris of a young, sexually attractive, ruthlessly ambitious young man, Georges Duroy, nicknamed Bel Ami, who makes his way in journalism and society despite having no literary talent, by tactically seducing the wives and daughters of the men who matter.
It’s a work of the greatest cynicism and ends with Georges triumphantly securing his fortunes by marrying the besotted teenage daughter, whom he does not love, of the most powerful man in Paris, whose previously impeccable wife he has also seduced then cruelly cast off.
The film is the first feature to be made by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, who jointly founded the admired theatre company Cheek by Jowl all of 31 years ago now. Their theatrical experience, and the rehearsals that went into this production, show in the way that expert staging of scenes and direction of the actors predominates over any more abstractly cinematic elements. But although made on a modest budget of £7.5 million, with Budapest standing in for Paris, the movie is very interestingly cast.
Robert Pattinson, Edward the sympa vamp from the Twilight Saga, plays Georges, in a big move into serious drama for him, comparable to Daniel Radcliffe’s effort in The Woman in Black. It has to be said that he doesn’t project obvious sexual charisma here and sometimes declines into petulance — but there’s an interesting play going on with the vampiric nature of Georges, his hunger and predatoriness, the way he feeds off others. Coming out of his villainous wedding into the light, he rolls his eyes back in a signature move. Explaining his ruthlessness to the one woman he might love, he says: “There is no next life — the flesh rots in the earth, it rots. I have seen men die and I am going to live — it’s so dear to me.” He is in some ways an absence, rather than a presence — but this works for the film.
His women are equally intriguingly cast. Kristin Scott Thomas, last seen in Partir (Leaving) as a woman having a desperate affair on the last edge of middle age, here plays Mme Rousset, frankly past it, the older wife, demure, drab and self-contained, until pitilessly debauched by Georges and rendered desperate and shameless, begging for a last kiss. “You disgust me, you smell of him,” says Georges, wrecking her.
Uma Thurman, no less, plays Madeleine, the bleakly beautiful, talented and strongly independent wife of George’s first patron Forestier. After Forestier’s agonising death from TB, Georges marries her in a mutually profitable arrangement but he is outplayed by her. Even when he brings the police to catch her in adultery, she remains impervious, her own heroine. “You stupid, stupid man, you complete and perfect man,” she says. We can’t wait to see Uma in Kill Bill: Volume 3.
As Georges’s younger woman, Clotilde, affectionate, warmly sexual and repeatedly forgiving his unforgiveable behaviour, Christina Ricci is really touching, while Holliday Grainger makes a fine foolish teenager as Suzanne, the indulged daughter of the Roussets.
The problems with Bel Ami — it does start to feel slow and insufficiently involving before the end — derive not so much from this creditable adaptation but from the utter cynicism of Maupassant himself. This is not in any way a romantic story, nor one in which in any character seems sympathetic.
Tolstoy, in his great 1894 essay on Maupassant, observed that he had no proper moral relation to his subjects — “he loved and represented what it was not right to love and represent”. Bel Ami is “a very filthy book”, Tolstoy thought, saved only by its contradictory awareness of death undercutting all life (here underplayed, give or take a few horrid beetles). The novel itself appalls more than it moves and the film is faithful to that to its own detriment.
The greatest Maupassant adaptation remains, of course, Jean Renoir’s 1936 film, Une Partie de Campagne, only 40 minutes long, unfinished but among the most captivating and affecting movies ever made. The story disgusted Tolstoy because of its “lack of distinction between bad and good” but all the beauty of life is there — and, if by some chance you don’t know it, don’t wait another day.
Source => London Evening Standard / Via => Spunk Ransom
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