Thérèse Desqueyroux
Claude Miller (2012)
Audrey Tautou expresses with some force the eponymous heroine’s state of mind. Thérèse Desqueyroux lives in a big house which sits in a vast landscape in rural south-west France: the nearest town, Argelouse, is small and small-minded but the spaciousness of her home and the arid expanse of the natural world outside it also contribute to Thérèse’s claustrophobia. Steeped in frustration, she’s sometimes so bored that she has to work hard to summon any feeling at all, let alone feign affability. But this is all plain to see – Audrey Tautou doesn’t do enough to persuade you that Thérèse’s real feelings could go unnoticed by her husband, the obtuse and self-centred Bernard Desqueyroux, and her in-laws, the de la Traves (Bernard’s widowed mother remarried). Tautou’s Thérèse is so hostile that it’s especially hard to believe that the family would, as they do, pin their hopes on her to make their daughter Anne see sense in her passion for a romantic but unsuitable (his family may be Jewish and is prone to TB) young man called Jean Azevedo. Tautou and Claude Miller, who also did the screenplay, may have focused too much on François Mauriac’s reference in the original novel to Thérèse’s ‘indifference, this total detachment separating her from everyone else and even from herself’. In doing so, they’ve overlooked the protagonist’s no less significant self-description – ‘masking myself, hiding myself, fooling them … ‘. Tautou’s playing means that Miller’s film (his last), as much as Thérèse, is going through the motions. (This is the second cinema adaptation of the novel: Georges Franju also made it, with Emmanuelle Riva in the lead, in 1962.)
The story of Thérèse Desqueyroux is a familiar one – of a woman whose lively mind and sensuality are stifled by her materially comfortable, emotionally starved circumstances, and who must rebel against them. Each time he takes his four drops of arsenic-based medicine, the foolish, somewhat hypochondriac Bernard counts the drops aloud, and gets on his wife’s nerves: you know that, given the opportunity, Thérèse will deliberately get the arithmetic wrong and administer a poisonous overdose. When she is brought to trial for the attempted murder of her husband, the family closes ranks to get her off the hook and to avoid a greater scandal; acquitted, Therese is then almost literally imprisoned by Bernard. The pine forest dowry with which her family seals her marriage – although the Desqueyroux are even bigger landowners – is threatened in a great fire at the height of summer (and Thérèse is a heavy smoker). Jean Azevedo, whom Thérèse likes the look and idea of (but whom she does not, it seems, desire sexually), first appears as a small figure singing alluringly in a red-sailed boat moving freely on the sea, far from dry (parched) land. In other words, the ironies and symbolism come across as obvious in Claude Miller’s film, whereas Mauriac’s novel brings out gradually and subtly the metaphorical aspect of the tinder-dry Landes region.
According to the littérateur Pierre-Henri Simon, ‘metaphor’ and ‘analogy’ may not be the right words to describe the connection between physical and psychological worlds in Mauriac, who saw:
‘… not an analogical relation but a necessary link, a vital solidarity, such that the scene and the event, the physical climate and the moral climate are presented as one, each explained by the other, in a totality at once profoundly psychological and intensely poetic. … It is not a question of metaphor, but of an intimate complicity being suggested between the domains of the soul and the flesh …’
It would take a master film-maker to realise this complex understanding of Mauriac and Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux is not subtle. The basic problem isn’t, however, that his screenplay is crude. It’s that film can visualise too easily – in a few frames – a connection between ‘the physical climate and the moral climate’. Miller achieves this impressively but then seems to be making over and over a point that the viewer got the first time it was made. The atmospheric texture of the film is relatively thin: this is partly because, in the book, smells are almost as crucial as sights and sounds, although that doesn’t explain why an important sequence like Thérèse’s leaving the courthouse at the end of her trial feels so perfunctory on the screen. The movie’s chronology is odd in more ways than one. The flashback to the close teenage friendship of Thérèse and her future sister-in-law Anne is dated 1922. The main action occurs in 1928 and 1929 (although the novel was published in 1927) but Thérèse seems decades older by then – and the ten-year age difference between Audrey Tautou and Anaïs Demoustier, who plays Anne, makes it hard to accept them as contemporaries. There are suggestions in the novel that the physical intimacy of the teenage girls resonates in lesbian feelings for Anne on the part of the adult Thérèse. But the complexity of this relationship is muffled in the film because Tautou’s Thérèse appears to be alienated from desire as well as by her family life (she has no maternal feelings for her baby daughter either). Her interpretation of Thérèse is less of a problem in her scenes with Jean Azevedo (Stanley Weber). As in the novel, Thérèse is aware of Jean’s good looks but it’s his difference from the culture of Argelouse that matters more to her.
Bernard is an obviously conceived and a despicable character in the novel. This small-time hunter (his real passion is not for his wife but for shooting pigeons) is also a selfish philistine. His exaggeration of his ailments (the angina that he fears turns out to be anaemia) reflects his self-preoccupation. Gilles Lellouche who plays Bernard is too old for the part. He was nearly forty when the film was shot; in the novel, Bernard is twenty-six (and it’s only his plump pomposity that sometimes makes him seem older – his new wife sees him as a ‘country boy’ as she watches him drink Rhenish wine on their honeymoon). In spite of this, it’s hard to think that anyone could have done much more with the role than Lellouche does; Audrey Tautou is much more effective when she’s playing off him than when she’s staring, with a kind of fuming disinterest, at Bernard and his family. Lellouche’s burly handsomeness cuts both ways: you sense that Thérèse thinks she ought to find her husband attractive but Bernard’s physically imposing quality actually makes him more clumsy and oppressive to her. Gilles Lellouche also makes Bernard more interesting by occasionally suggesting that he can see the effect he’s having on Thérèse. One of the best scenes is their last together, when Bernard is about to set his wife free in Paris (now that the successfully conformed Anne de la Trave has made a suitable marriage, Thérèse can be let off the leash). Bernard is tired by now and Lellouche shows his residual affection for his wife coming through involuntarily. Gilles Lellouche makes Claude Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux a good deal easier to watch than it would otherwise have been but he isn’t Mauriac’s Bernard: Lellouche has charm whereas Bernard in the novel is consistently charmless. This and Audrey Tautou’s lack of variation (and charm) alter the balance of audience sympathy with, even of interest in, the principal characters.
27 June 2013