Colonel Chabert

In 1817, there arrives in Paris a shabby, mysterious man (Depardieu) who claims to be Colonel Chabert, a war hero believed to have been killed a decade previously in the Napoleonic battle of Eylau. He employs a lawyer, Derville (Fabrice Luchini), who is also counsel to Chabert's wife, haughty Countess Ferraud (Fanny Ardant), now re-married. Her social standing, along with the lofty political aspirations of her new husband (Andre Dussollier), is jeopardized by Chabert's reappearance, which threatens to fill in the facts of her sketchy background and questionably acquired, if convenient, wealth. Chabert remains haunted by terrible memories of war, which recur in nightmares. Derville plots a grand maneuver; by legally resurrecting Chabert, he hopes to control the intertwined destinies (and fortunes) of all three clients. A series of stormy encounters between the ardent Chabert and the recalcitrant Countess, arbitrated by the foxy Derville, ensue at her lavish country retreat. No clear victor emerges.

Yves Angelo, best known as the cinematographer of TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE, THE ACCOMPANIST, and UN COEUR EN HIVER, makes his directorial debut with this adaptation of the novel by Honore de Balzac. Photographed by Bernard Lutic, the film is visually beautiful, from its wordless, Goya-esque scenes of the dead piled high on the battlefield to the gorgeous countryside estate of the Countess. It's as pretty as a picture, and just as static. Angelo starts his film with a suicidally long expository monologue by Depardieu; the unalloyed ennui it inspires in the viewer makes it all the more difficult to become involved in a narrative in which not much happens to begin with. In order to enliven Balzac's tale of greed and internecine legal struggle, a canny director might have found a way to relate the tale to contemporary experience (as Claude Berri does in his 1994 filming of Zola's Germinal). Angelo seems content merely to photograph his actors as strikingly as possible, arrange impressive visual compositions, and let the thing just play itself out.

Depardieu is fine as usual, although he perhaps fails to live up to a sly line given to Derville, who takes the case on the theory that, even if Chabert proves to be a fraud, "I'll have seen the most skilled actor of our time." Ardant, with her equine features and patrician bearing, is the very image of affronted aristocracy, but her stormy, insufficiently suggestive encounters with Depardieu imply a summit meeting of two wily politicians more than any re-ignition of romantic heat. The film depends too much on a tony selection of music, which includes Beethoven's D-Minor Trio for the battlefield, Scarlatti for the Count and Countess scenes, and Schubert to accompany Chabert's memories of war. One would really do better to turn on a stereo and read the book. (Adult situations, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment