Director discovers Moliere

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

It might seem odd for Laurent Tirard to have reinvigorated the reputation of one of his country's greatest dramatists. The 40-year-old French director didn't even like the theater before embarking on his film "Moliere."

"Like everybody in France, I studied Moliere's works in school at an age where I was absolutely too young and too immature to understand them and appreciate them. So, I decided he was old-fashioned and boring and I didn't care much for theater anyway," Mr. Tirard said during a recent stop in the District. "Everything is fake; everybody's talking very loud."

That changed when he rediscovered the 17th-century playwright's work as an adult.

"By accident — although nothing ever happens by accident — three years ago, I re-read 'Le Misanthrope,' " he said. "And I was just amazed by how brilliant he was and by how contemporary it was. I think 'Le Misanthrope' is really about depression and about trying to fit in society when you have very strong moral ethics. And of course that doesn't mean anything to a 16-year-old. Only when you turn 30 and have to deal with these things do you really appreciate it."

Mr. Tirard, who had one feature film to his name, 2004's "Mensonges et trahisons et plus si affinites " ("The Story of My Life"), considered adapting the play. He then realized he should read Moliere's other works as well,. But he had a problem: He loved a full dozen of them but couldn't adapt them all. Finally he decided, "I'll invent a play with all the characters I liked from all the other Moliere plays, and some of the situations," he recalls. The playwright himself would link everything together.

And so was born "Moliere," which opened Friday. The film takes a little-known period of the young artist's life and imagines it to be the inspiration for the genius that followed.

Moliere spent time in debtors' prison as a young man and no one knows who bailed him out or what he did shortly thereafter. Mr. Tirard was inspired by Luigi Pirandello's play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and even the famous disappearance of British mystery writer Agatha Christie.

Mr. Tirard says he feels "very French" but is well-versed in art and artists from outside his country. He studied film at New York University and worked as a script reader for Warner Bros.

What this engineer's son liked about studying filmmaking in the U.S. is the pragmatic approach. "There were rules that you learn, a tradition that you have to learn from. You first become a craftsman and then, if you are talented, you can become an artist, maybe," he says. "Whereas in France, there is a tendency for people to think you are born an artist. And because you are born an artist, you don't really have to learn. ... Some of them, because they are talented, do pretty well. With some others, it's an excuse for doing a badly constructed script that has no meaning whatsoever."

Mr. Tirard returned to France, however, for the creative freedom. In the process, he's brought a new vision of a French icon to the screen and so to the world.

Tackling France's Shakespeare was a gamble. He recalls phoning his co-writer, Gregoire Vigneron, telling him that he wanted to write a film based not on Moliere's life but actually reinventing it: "There was long silence. 'Are you crazy?' " Mr. Vigneron replied.

Of the critics, he recalls: "half of them said, 'What a brilliant idea'; half of them said, 'What a stupid idea, how dare you, who are you, young man, to think you can reinvent Moliere?' But the audience liked it very much."

That suits him just fine: "The idea was really to make the film to make Moliere accessible to people who didn't know him so well. Or people like me who studied [his works] in school and thought he was boring and old-fashioned. And, really, that's 80 percent of the French population."

He succeeded: "A lot of people said they came out of the movie and wanted to go to bookstores and buy Moliere's plays."

Now he's taking on another French cultural icon for his next project, "Le petit Nicolas," a humorous children's book written by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempe that describes the daily life of a little boy living in the 1960s. "It has been "a huge hit ever since," he says. "Every generation of French kids reads that book."