COLONEL CHABERT: Drama. In French with
subtitles. Starring Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Fabrice Luchini.
Directed by Yves Angelo. (Unrated. 110 minutes. At the Clay
Theater.)
`Colonel Chabert,” which opens today at the Clay, is a moody period
piece with Gerard Depardieu as a Napoleonic officer who returns to
his home in Paris 10 years after he is presumed dead. An adaptation
of the Balzac novel of the same name, the picture is a meditation on
the greed and venality of society and the tenuousness of life and
position.
Directed by Yves Angelo, who worked as director of photography on
“Germinal” and “Un Coeur en Hiver,” the film begins with a stark
visual statement: a vast landscape in the aftermath of a battle.
Filming in muted colors, Angelo shows a field of corpses, then moves
in to show the living going about the grim business of stripping
those bodies of everything that might be of material value.
The spectacle is a strong and clever encapsulation of the view,
expressed throughout the film, that money and power — not emotion —
are the main currencies in all human interaction. The scene also
shows the turning point of Chabert’s life. Wounded, pronounced dead,
he is tossed into a pit of bodies he has to claw his way out of.
TEN YEARS LATER
After this little prologue, the film takes up Chabert’s story 10
years later, in 1817. Chabert is lumbering along the Paris streets as
only Depardieu can lumber, a near-derelict whose wife (Fanny Ardant)
refuses to acknowledge his identity. The director gives us flashes
from Chabert’s previous life of wealth and position, again using a
slightly washed-out palette to suggest a past that’s fading and will
soon vanish.
“Colonel Chabert” provides a showcase for three superb
performances, the most memorable of
which is Fabrice Luchini’s as Derville, a great lawyer. Best known in
the United States as the slippery seducer in “La Discrete,” Luchini
again plays a character in love with the sound of his own voice. But
Derville doesn’t scatter his words. He’s slight, smart and dangerous,
calmly delighting in the power of his words to heal or destroy.
TWO DIFFERENT STYLES
The scene in which Chabert asks Derville to represent him provides
a nice case of Depardieu’s playing a scene opposite an actor whose
cinematic light burns as brightly as his own. Client and lawyer are a
study in contrasts: the sincere, slow-talking big guy and the shrewd,
fast-talking little guy — both good guys, in completely different
styles.
The villain of the piece is the wife, but she’s far from a true
villain. Ardant plays a woman who has remarried, had children and is
afraid that the resurfacing of Chabert will provide her new husband
with an excuse to leave her. She is the most desperate person in the
film, the one who has everything and is afraid to lose it.
Although the pace is sometimes slow, the situation is so
inherently dramatic, and the resulting intrigues so engrossing, that
the film never loses interest. Ultimately, “Colonel Chabert”
becomes more than just the recounting of a strange incident; it’s
also a parable about the difference between identity and selfhood —
and how society will often confer the former only on those willing to
compromise the latter.