A French-language review of "Molière" (accessible under IMDb's External Reviews) compares this movie to "Shakespeare in Love," and that's probably the easiest way to sum it up. Both films are comedies that make no claims to biographical accuracy. Instead, they fictionalize a period of a few months when the playwright in question was young, brooding, amorous, in need of money and constantly getting into scrapes.
When this movie begins, Molière (Romain Duris) is a young actor who wants to play great tragic roles but finds that his comic mugging gets more applause. Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), a middle-aged merchant who has written a play that he hopes will impress the witty Célimène (Ludivine Sagnier), hires Molière to help him stage it. Jourdain doesn't want anyone to hear about this plan, so Molière goes to live in his house disguised as a priest named Tartuffe. There, he gets involved in a number of comic subplots. He participates in the Jourdain-Célimène intrigue, helps a pair of young lovers, falls in love with Jourdain's elegant wife Elmire (Laura Morante), and finds his voice as a writer.
If you're familiar with the plays of Molière, you probably recognize many of the character names in the preceding paragraph. Jourdain is "The Bourgeois Gentleman" himself, Célimène is the heroine of "The Misanthrope," and "Tartuffe" is a comedy about a man who pretends to be a priest while he's really trying to seduce his host's wife. In other words, the movie playfully suggests that Molière didn't invent his famous characters and plots out of thin air, but stole them from experiences he'd had as a young man.
This premise could leave "Molière" feeling like nothing but one big in-joke, enjoyable only if you already know a lot about the author. Fortunately, the reason Molière's works have endured is because they're universal and they're funny. You might get an extra kick out of some of the movie's dialogue if you realize it quotes a Molière play, but it's also funny dialogue in its own right. Characters such as Jourdain, the ridiculous fool who eventually gains a measure of pathos, are still familiar to us today. Luchini, Sagnier, Morante and others do a good job of incarnating their stock characters, and Duris makes a very charismatic, humorous, passionate Molière.
My one complaint about "Molière" is that the prologue and epilogue, which take place 13 years after the events of the main story, don't work. The tone switches from farcical comedy to heavy drama (centered on a deathbed scene, believe it or not), and the movie makes the reductive point that everything works out happily at the end of Molière's plays because his own life didn't work out quite so neatly.
In this movie, Molière finds his voice when he realizes that comedy can tell just as much about the human condition as tragedy can. And the main storyline, which is farcical but rarely too cartoonish, affirms thisuntil the downbeat ending, when the filmmakers lose their trust in comedy, and insist for the first time that Molière must be treated seriously. A shame that they betrayed the spirit of the movie like this, because otherwise it's an entertaining, affectionate but irreverent homage to a great playwright.
When this movie begins, Molière (Romain Duris) is a young actor who wants to play great tragic roles but finds that his comic mugging gets more applause. Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), a middle-aged merchant who has written a play that he hopes will impress the witty Célimène (Ludivine Sagnier), hires Molière to help him stage it. Jourdain doesn't want anyone to hear about this plan, so Molière goes to live in his house disguised as a priest named Tartuffe. There, he gets involved in a number of comic subplots. He participates in the Jourdain-Célimène intrigue, helps a pair of young lovers, falls in love with Jourdain's elegant wife Elmire (Laura Morante), and finds his voice as a writer.
If you're familiar with the plays of Molière, you probably recognize many of the character names in the preceding paragraph. Jourdain is "The Bourgeois Gentleman" himself, Célimène is the heroine of "The Misanthrope," and "Tartuffe" is a comedy about a man who pretends to be a priest while he's really trying to seduce his host's wife. In other words, the movie playfully suggests that Molière didn't invent his famous characters and plots out of thin air, but stole them from experiences he'd had as a young man.
This premise could leave "Molière" feeling like nothing but one big in-joke, enjoyable only if you already know a lot about the author. Fortunately, the reason Molière's works have endured is because they're universal and they're funny. You might get an extra kick out of some of the movie's dialogue if you realize it quotes a Molière play, but it's also funny dialogue in its own right. Characters such as Jourdain, the ridiculous fool who eventually gains a measure of pathos, are still familiar to us today. Luchini, Sagnier, Morante and others do a good job of incarnating their stock characters, and Duris makes a very charismatic, humorous, passionate Molière.
My one complaint about "Molière" is that the prologue and epilogue, which take place 13 years after the events of the main story, don't work. The tone switches from farcical comedy to heavy drama (centered on a deathbed scene, believe it or not), and the movie makes the reductive point that everything works out happily at the end of Molière's plays because his own life didn't work out quite so neatly.
In this movie, Molière finds his voice when he realizes that comedy can tell just as much about the human condition as tragedy can. And the main storyline, which is farcical but rarely too cartoonish, affirms thisuntil the downbeat ending, when the filmmakers lose their trust in comedy, and insist for the first time that Molière must be treated seriously. A shame that they betrayed the spirit of the movie like this, because otherwise it's an entertaining, affectionate but irreverent homage to a great playwright.