Word: monsieurs
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...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 Irène brings with her in her in frequent appearances. Like any grandparent, he can pamper or scold the little ones. Like any widower...
...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...
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 Irène. "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...
Such behavior, of course, can be interpreted as part of the antimanners of an elaborate antistyle. Not everyone is wearing a blue blazer and short hair. At the crowded Astor Place Haircutters, a few dozen blocks from the orchid-scented salon of Monsieur Marc, the walls are decorated with a cellophane-taped montage of punk haircuts: the teeth cut, the rainbow cut, the fungi cut, the oh, s&$151;-- cut ("We call it that," says Owner Enrico Vezzo, "because that's what the customer says when he looks in the mirror...