I've been thinking about the late French director Patrice Chereau (1944-2013) a lot since this summer, when I saw the Ring at the Bayreuth Festival in the production by Frank Castorf (more on that some other day, but my summary is that the first two operas in the cycle are superb and the last two underwhelming). I primarily knew Chereau as a French movie director and stage director, but it turns out he was made famous, at least in certain circles, by his centenary production of the Ring Cycle at Bayreuth in 1976. By a stroke of luck, I managed to buy the very last new copy of Chereau's Ring Cycle on Amazon (back when it was offered at a reasonable price; it's now being reissued with a hefty price tag) so I've watched it from beginning to end and was very impressed by Chereau's creativity and ingenuity, although the production is sometimes a bit dark (visually) for my taste. And he was only 32 at the time! Imagine that. He also directed a landmark stage production of Phedre in 2003 with one of his favorite actresses, Dominique Blanc, in the title role.
But Chereau for me remains first the director of many movies that have marked my youth. He tended to work again and again with actors he liked and he happened to like many of the foremost French actors of that generation. I feel American movie-goers don't know what the trend toward blockbusters is depriving them of, with either ad-hoc casts put together for each movie or franchises using cardboard characters in the same lifeless roles. In France when I was in college I remember the movies by Chereau the most and also by Arnaud Desplechin, who also tended to hire repeatedly the actors he liked to work with (Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, etc).
Last week I watched Queen Margot again starring the superstar Isabelle Adjani, as well as Vincent Perez, who disappeared from the screens when he got tired of the heartthrob roles (or didn't negotiate the transition successfully, or didn't find roles he liked and decided to do something else with his time), Pascal Greggory, who was Chereau's long-term partner, Dominique Blanc, Jean-Hughes Anglade, and so many actors such as Emmanuel Salinger who make a cameo at the beginning of the movie as wedding guests that you just know from the cast list how much of a privilege it was to take part in a Chereau movie. I remember that movie, at the end of my high school years, before I moved to Paris. How my girl friends and I all chatted about the movie (Isabelle Adjani! Vincent Perez!) instead of studying for the baccalaureat.
I also remember Those who love me can take the train. The movie isn't particularly action-driven and so wouldn't be to most Americans' liking (you can tell this is the case from the fact that the movie isn't offered on Amazon Instant Video, contrary to Queen Margot). In some French movies and French novels, nothing much happens - people argue, people reconcile, and so on. We French people like to talk. I remember watching the movie when I was in Paris - I was in engineering school back then, I think it was the end of my second year.
The movie is about people who are on a train to go to the funeral of someone they knew, who wants to be buried in Limoges. I went to see the movie because Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was in a leading role (sister to Carla, but a very different personality), as well as Charles Berling, and Jean-Louis Trintignant (names that may mean nothing to my American readers), and Vincent Perez cast as a transsexual who is transitioning to being a woman (how many young, handsome male actors who had half the teenage population in love with them would dare do that? and this was 1998, let me remind you). Chereau wasn't afraid of being ahead of his time on certain topics - the sign of a true, uncompromising artist.
There is a final twist to this post. I've been researching Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because of a novel I'm writing (I saw that at Bayreuth too this summer, in addition to the Ring), and the very best production I've ever been able to watch, whether live or in DVD, is the one with Waltraud Meier and Ian Storey at La Scala in 2007. I love the use of light and shadow, the spare sets that avoid being too abstract, the choice of costumes - I love absolutely everything to the DVD, except that in the third act, the person who was making the DVD decided to use a lot of "fading to black" between scenes, which is distracting and sometimes downright aggravating. But besides that, I worship that production like few others (Luc Bondy's Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera comes second). And guess who directed the Scala production of Tristan? Sure enough, Patrice Chereau.
People who are not particularly creative are quick to dismiss creative people. What is it, they wonder, that those creative folks do that is supposedly so important? And it is true that a lot of "art" produced by pseudo-creatives is drivel. But when you see the work of someone like Chereau, or Yael Farber today, you really understand what makes exceptional artists so needed in today's society. They make us see the world in ways we hadn't imagined before - they offer new perspectives, fresh insights, shed a new light on a well-known play or opera, bring an aspect of human relations to the forefront by making a movie about it. Chereau died at 68 from lung cancer two years ago (read his obituary in the New York Times and in The Guardian). That was much too soon.
Next on my viewing list: his very last production, opera Elektra by Richard Strauss at the 2013 Aix-en-Provence festival. I have no doubt it's going to be spectacular.
Hi! Happy Holidays! It was nice seeing your name on my Goodreads page. I have read your books and was wondering when you have something new coming out?
Posted by: Laura Lee Fitzpatrick | December 12, 2015 at 08:14 PM