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An 'Englishwoman' in Paris sparks a revolution among cinema audiences
By Julian Coman in Paris
(Filed: 16/09/2001) A DAMNING film portrait of the French Revolution has scandalised audiences more used to tales of Jacobin heroism than images of drunk, stupid and sadistic peasants waving heads on spikes. The film, released last week and entitled, inaccurately, L'Anglaise et le Duc (The Englishwoman and the Duke), is directed by one of France's best-loved film-makers, Eric Rohmer. Based on the testimony of Grace Elliot, a young Scottish countess living in Paris during the Terror, it presents a trenchant view of the Revolution as nasty, bloody and anarchic. Until last week, Republican France had never seen anything like it. As indignant Parisians watched sans-culottes (revolutionary zealots) commit a series of unspeakable atrocities on screen, and bridled at the royalist sympathies of Miss Elliot, film critics began to launch their own revolt. Within the space of a week, Mr Rohmer's film has been variously described as "revisionist", "heretical", "neo-monarchist" and "counter-revolutionary". Mr Rohmer has previously been the darling of the French cinema-going public, following successes such as Claire's Knee and The Green Ray. Yet his current unpopularity cannot have surprised him. In highlighting the horrified reactions of an Anglo-Saxon monarchist as she watches the bloodthirsty Paris mob, Mr Rohmer has thumbed a nose at previous tub-thumping French blockbusters. Films such as Jean Renoir's classic, La Marseillaise, have depicted the Revolution as a triumph of Jacobin courage over aristocratic arrogance. In French schools, the crimes of the Terror are glossed over as a necessary if unfortunate stage in the birth of the Republic. Seen through the eyes of Miss Elliot and Mr Rohmer, however, the Jacobins are anything but a collection of virtuous freedom-fighters. Most revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious and sadistic; the majority are stupid, and nearly all are drunk. Innocents are arrested and executed on a whim; homes are looted and the streets of Paris witness an unceasing parade of heads on spikes. As Miss Elliot travels through central Paris, she is confronted by an alcohol-fuelled Jacobin who forces the bloody head of an aristocratic friend through the windows of her carriage. Later she weeps as she hears the mob howl with delight at the execution of the king. In her diary, which forms the basis of the film's script, she remembers the day as "the most horribly sad that I have ever lived. The clouds themselves seemed to be in mourning". She also charts the decline and fall of her one-time lover, the Duc D'Orleans, the cousin of the king, who voted for his death but then followed him to the scaffold. Sophie Guichard, film critic for France Soir, said: "How can one not be shocked by this portrait of the typical revolutionary? How can one forget that this period also gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, from which we still benefit? The film lacks all balance." Mr Rohmer is unapologetic. Claiming that L'Anglaise et le Duc "could have been an awful lot more violent", the director said: "I am showing mass murderers, the pits of society, people who killed for pleasure and under the influence of alcohol. I think Grace Elliot was mostly right about the Revolution - it was the end of a world, of a refined civilisation." In Paris, cinema audiences are split between royalists and republicans. Sophie Boutin, a teacher, said: "This is a film made by an intellectual who is a Catholic and in all probability a monarchist. It's just a polemic against 1789." But Jacques Ferney, a 24-year-old language student, disagreed. "It was about time someone looked at the Revolution from a different perspective," he said. "As we grow up, there is so much pompous rubbish talked in school about how liberty, equality and fraternity arrived in 1789, but no one bothers to remember all the innocent people who were butchered. I think it's a good film." |
