A lazy day in the country side. An artist expects his son's family to come and visit him and his housekeeper. They do come. The sons' kids run around. The parents dutifully scold them for misbehaving. The artist languidly chats with his son and his son's wife about ordinary things. While most of the grown-ups are asleep, the artist's daugther arrive in a fancy automobile (this is the 1910s). Her arrival puts a sudden end to the tranquility we've seen so far. The daughter is admired by everybody. Will she stay for dinner?
This sounds like a meagre plot. It's not. Or: the plot is not so important. Nothing out of the ordinary happens in the movie, the story of which spans a few short hours. A family is spending leisurly time together. Most things have an air of rituals that have existed a long time, comments that are uttered against a background we are not completely aware of. On some level, they seem to be a happy family (even though this is put in a somewhat new light as the daughter arrives from Paris, a favorite child of the father). This is not the type of movie that hints at dark secrets or never-ending neurotic preoccupations. Yes, there is friction, but it is not the kind of friction that threatens the possibility of communication. What Bernard Tavernier tells us about is rather an unspoken sense of disappointment or an equally unspoken feeling of having disappointed somebody else.
One could say that this film is just as idle as its lazy surroundings. Proust could have written the script. In one eerie scene, we see the family having dinner. Need I say that nothing spectacular happens (they praise the food, one kid brags about having experienced the state of drunkenness) The strange thing is that the picture fades out to a black screen quite a few times so that we expect a new scene to begin. It doesn't. The dinner scene goes on and on, and just as in some moments in Proust's book, we gain a sense of time having freezed. This is the eternity that everyday life sometimes can lull us into (which need not be a sign of false consciousness).
The film's aesthetic builds around a hazy yellowish green that permeats almost every scene (in an exquisite way, I might never have seen such greens!), and produces a dream-like quality. Of course, the dialogue reveals some personal things about the characters (how the son has a complicated relation to giving up art or how the father quietly scornes the son's having changed his name), but mostly, we hear small talk, irritating repetitions, idle chatter. Actually, except for the artist's glamorous daughter, Irene, and her father, who has sunken into a nostalgic form of sadness, most of the characters are dull, respectable, in line with what is expected of them. In the hands of a less imaginative director, this would make for a boring film as well, but instead, we have a film that without a trace of bitterness or glacial irony attempts to give a fair picture of the dull life of the rich.
All this works very well, save for the, in my view, unnecessary ending scene. A Sunday In the Country will perhaps not change your life, but it is a charming little film nonetheless - or one might even say that it is a beautiful film about the magic patterns of everyday life. Some have compared Tavarnier's film to Yoshiro Ozu. To me, that makes sense: both have eyes and ears for life beyond the dramatic or the poignant.
No comments:
Post a Comment