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Review: P.S., I Love You, Molière and Lady Chatterley

By March 6, 2008December 30th, 20104 Comments

PS I Love You posterHilary Swank’s new twin-hanky romance P.S., I Love You is a remark­able achieve­ment. In all my years of cinema-going I don’t think I have ever seen a film get more wrong. From the clunky premise to the ghastly cos­tume design; through awk­ward reverses in tone plus no small amount of self-indulgence on the part of Swank; it is as if every­one involved (when faced with a choice between the right way and the wrong way) simply flipped a coin and it came up “wrong” every time.

Swank plays New York wid­ow Holly Kennedy, whose Irish hus­band Gerry (300s Gerard Butler) dies of a brain tumour fol­low­ing a scene demon­strat­ing how power­ful and tem­pes­tu­ous their romance is. Shortly after the wake, Holly starts receiv­ing let­ters from Gerry, writ­ten before he died in order to coach her through the grief and help her start again. As if.

One of the let­ters includes tick­ets to Ireland for Holly and her best friends so she can revis­it the scene of their first meet­ing (prompt­ing an intol­er­ably banal flash­back scene). Meanwhile sup­port­ing cast Gina Gershon and Lisa Kudrow can enjoy the nat­ives tooraloo-ing in that way that only the Hollywood Irish can.

Among all the oth­er crimes com­mit­ted by P.S., I Love You they cast won­der­ful musi­cians Harry Connick Jr. and Nellie McKay and then don’t let them sing! But they make sure that Swank and Butler get to warble their way through a karaōke scene or two instead. Gah! Wrong-headed wrongy wrong wrong­ness. From Wrongville.

Moliere posterThe French nation­al theatre is called the Comédie-Française (which gives us a fair idea of what the French like to see on stage) and France’s pre-eminent play­wright is the legendary sat­ir­ist and far­ceur Molière who reformed and trans­formed French theatre dur­ing the late 17th cen­tury. Molière now gets the Shakespeare in Love treat­ment with a glossy biop­ic spec­u­lat­ing about a miss­ing peri­od in the playwright’s life – in 1645 his com­pany became bank­rupt and Molière was thrown in jail. Mysteriously, his debts were paid and he was forced to tour the provinces for 12 years before return­ing to Paris and the pat­ron­age of Louis XIV.

In Laurent Tirard’s film Molière (Romain Duris) is res­cued by a wealthy busi­ness­man (Fabrice Luchini) who wishes to be coached in the ways of the theatre in order to woo the beau­ti­ful but arrog­ant Célimène (Swimming Pool’s Ludovine Sagnier). The businessman’s wife (Laura Morante) is not to know, of course, so Molière must mas­quer­ade as a priest provid­ing spir­itu­al train­ing to the fam­ily. It’s a clas­sic farce set-up and we are asked to believe, some­what fanci­fully, that this situ­ation is the light-bulb moment that trans­forms Molière’s work and, thus, French cul­ture forever.

Molière is a pass­able enter­tain­ment if you are unfa­mil­i­ar with the playwright’s work but if you get the ref­er­ences you may find it more sat­is­fy­ing than I did. Duris seems mis­cast as Molière: alto­geth­er too intense.

Lady Chatterley posterD. H. Lawrence must have really liked the story of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as he wrote it twice, the second time with the improb­able title “John Thomas and Lady Jane”. It’s this second ver­sion that Pascale Ferran has adap­ted as Lady Chatterley, star­ring Marina Hands as the eponym­ous aris­to­crat awakened by Jean-Louis Coullo’ch’s man of the soil.

Lord Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot) returns from World War One without the use of, ahem, any­thing below his waist – a meta­phor­ic­al as well as phys­ic­al dis­ab­il­ity. On a walk through the estate his young and inno­cent wife Constance spots middle-aged game­keep­er Parkin wash­ing him­self and finds her­self attrac­ted to his rugged Oliver Stone crossed with Klaus Kinski look as well as his easy, nat­ur­al way with the land. An affair com­mences and then plays itself out and that’s about it.

Too respect­ful of it’s source mater­i­al to really come alive on screen, Lady Chatterley is inex­plic­ably (and unfor­giv­ably) 2 and a half hours long.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 5 March, 2008.

After this went to print I dis­covered that Lady Chatterley was inten­ded as a two-part mini-series for French tele­vi­sion and thus it’s length is not so inex­plic­able. Still unfor­giv­able, though.

4 Comments

  • Llew says:

    his rugged Oliver Stone crossed with Klaus Kinski look

    SOmehow this is the fun­ni­est line I’ve read all day.

  • his rugged Oliver Stone crossed with Klaus Kinski look

    So he’s like the Gerard Depardieu you have when you’re not hav­ing a Gerard Depardieu?

  • Irish Abroad says:

    PS I Love – was writ­ten Cecila Ahern the daugh­ter of the Irish Prime min­is­ter , An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. As if that’s not bad enough from the trail­ers I’ve seen, Gerard Butler deliv­ers the worst Irish accent delivered on screen since Tom Cruise appeared in ‘Far and Away’. At least he dies early on in the movie.

  • dano says:

    PS I Love – was writ­ten Cecila Ahern the daugh­ter of the Irish Prime min­is­ter , An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. As if that’s not bad enough from the trail­ers I’ve seen, Gerard Butler deliv­ers the worst Irish accent delivered on screen since Tom Cruise appeared in ‘Far and Away’. At least he dies early on in the movie.

    But that’s one of the prob­lems – he dies but he just won’t go away…