I'm still trying to figure out what it is about the French and Classic texts. They love 'fixing' them when they ain't broke as much as they seem to love the originals. In the last five years I've seen on the Paris stage productions of 'Un Tramway nomme Desir' in which the 'flowers for the dead' reference was moved from the beginning to the end; where Blanche and Mitch not only went on a date but were SHOWN in a jazz club complete with a full-length blues performed by a Black singer (not in any production I've ever seen) and, to cap it all, the nurse who accompanies the doctor in the final scene was played by an obvious transvestite wearing drag ('she' was listed as a man in the program) who arm-wrestles Blanche to the floor. This was followed a couple of years later by 'The Glass Menagerie' which begins with a Prologue in which Tom and The Gentleman Caller perform a soft-shoe to Jack Teagarden's recording of 'I'm Confessing'. In the original play the Gentleman Caller appears only at the end but what does Tennessee Williams know. Chekhov gets the same treatment. La Petite Lili is a take on 'The Seagull' and last year I fought to get tickets for an acclaimed production starring a great French actress, Irene Jacob, as Nina. I was slightly bemused BEFORE the play started when the management appeared to play EVERY recording of 'Over The Rainbow' in existence. Then the play began - with Masha performing a raunchy version of 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' punctuated by swigs from a can of lager (neither the song nor canned beer was available in 19904). Call me square and old fashioned but I prefer the opening line that Chekhov wrote for Masha 'I'm in mourning for my life'. As if that weren't enough from time to time the proceedings ground to a halt as the ensemble broke into 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow'. But why am I telling you all this? Because now Claude Miller has put his two cents worth in, updating the story to take account of film and video technology and changing the character's names although leaving their actual roles the same. There's some nice moody photography but when the oldest character on the Lot, the superb Jean Paul Marielle, runs, not walks away with the movie something is badly wrong. All things being equal this should be Nina's movie but given that they cast the ubiquitous Ludivine Sagnier (again at the expense of the far superior Virginie Ledoyan) who is rapidly cornering the market in overripe sexy sluts (think Jennifer Jones in 'Gone to Earth', 'Duel In The Sun', etc), and clearly has her eyes on the gap left by Vanessa Paradis, this was never going to happen. If only someone would get hip that's it's not enough to look as though you go through life wearing slightly soiled underwear and are happy to flaunt your dubious charms and play sex scenes, you also have to be able to ACT, then maybe Sagnier could settle for a career in the French equivalent of the 'Carry On' series and leave the acting to Ledoyan. On the plus side this film is worth seeing if only for a handful of scenes at the end in which Marielle comes face to face on a movie set with Michel Piccoli, playing Marielle on film (don't ask). It seems that when Claude Miller is killing waterfowls he leaves no tern unstoned.
Review of La petite Lili
