This buttock-clenchingly embarrassing movie from director Valérie Donzelli is a pre-Revolutionary period drama from the quality end of the sugary French market – theatrically tricked out with one or two annoying and clumsy Brechtian touches of stylised self-aware modernity. It is based on the true story of forbidden love between two aristocratic siblings, Marguerite and Julien de Ravalet, executed in 1603 for adultery and incest, and the movie endows them with a grisly Abelard-and-Heloise-style pomposity and shrill self-importance, absolutely without eroticism or romance. They are played by Anaïs Demoustier and Jérémie Elkhaïm (who co-wrote the screenplay with Donzelli): Raoul Fernandez plays Lefebvre, the dull fellow to whom poor, pouting Marguerite’s family try marrying her off and – incredibly – Geraldine Chaplin plays his mum, with a peevish scowl and odd, almost Pierrette-style makeup.
There are turkeys and there are turkeys. This is a turkey de luxe, with stuffing, bread sauce, and a paper hat. It is the sort of thing that Ernie Wise might have written one of his plays about, with Glenda Jackson taking the female lead, opposite Eric Morecambe as Julien. There is mad over-acting, a sinister reactionary priest and two separate face-slapping incidents. When Marguerite and Julien finally make their escape, they have weird, freaky nature-embracing sex in a forest: it looks madly uncomfortable, like the performances. Afterwards, Julien somehow makes a fire, heats up water in a pan – and actually washes her hair. It’s a mercy that they didn’t settle down to watch the news on a TV set that he’d somehow rigged up. Anyway it’s a lovely moment. When they approach the coast, intending to get a boat across to England, they have somehow got hold of a donkey, on which Marguerite is riding, dressed as a boy – with a false moustache, apparently put on with a burnt cork. In later scenes, the moustache vanishes. Evidently, Marguerite decided it didn’t look convincing enough.
It is strange that Cannes will keep on mystifyingly offering us terrible movies from its home turf or home team, often with this stately period flavour: wigs, and frills and furbelows: I remember Roland Joffe’s Vatel, starring Gérard Depardieu in 16th-century France – it was never released in the UK. Marguerite & Julien is well up there in the awfulness stakes. It is strange to think of what François Truffaut said about the stuffy old cinéma du papa – this kind of cinema refuses to die, and why should it? And yet on the basis of Marguerite & Julien it is already dead.
