Laura and I just got back from seeing the utterly fabulous film Moliere, directed by Laurent Tirard and starring Romain Duris. Now, obviously I am predisposed to enjoy any movie about Moliere, but Laura also really thought it was pretty great.

The premise of the movie is similar to Shakespeare in Love or Dick in that it is an imaginative rewriting of history. Moliere was imprisoned for his theatre company's debts to a candlemaker in 1644. His debt was paid by a bourgeois artisan named Leonard Aubry, apparently out of the goodness of his heart. (But eventually Moliere's father repaid Aubry.) The following year Moliere joined up with most of the same actors and toured in the provinces for about 13 years.

The first ten minutes are kind of a cheesy mess, with a lot of "Look, we're actors! At Versailles!" (in a theatre that wasn't built until nearly a hundred years later, which annoyed P. but didn't bother me so much). And Moliere wanders around all moody and says eight thousand times that he really wants to be a grand tragic actor.

But then we flash back "thirteen years earlier," and we see the imprisonment and the strange circumstances of Moliere's debt being paid. And this is where the film starts to be genius, because Moliere walks into a palimpsest of every play he ever wrote. The name of Moliere's benefactor is Monsieur Jourdain (the title character in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme). He asks Moliere to coach him in acting in two plays he has written in order to impress Celimene (the leading lady from The Misanthrope). All this must be kept a secret from M. Jourdain's wife, Elmire, so Moliere poses as a clergyman under the codename Tartuffe. Meanwhile, Jourdain's older daughter Agnes is tossing notes over the hedge to her suitor as if she were in The School for Wives, and there are subtler references to The Imaginary Invalid and The Learned Ladies in the tutelage of younger daughter Louison. The plot is basically The Bourgeois Gentleman, but dialogue and situations from other Moliere plays abound. There's a great scene with Moliere/Jourdan doing the Alceste/Oronte argument over Oronte's poem from The Misanthrope, and a delightful entrance into Celimene's salon that is straight out of Les Precieuses ridicules.

But I don't know if you need to get all of that to enjoy the movie. (It certainly helps, just as knowing more about the Watergate scandal might increase your enjoyment of Dick.) There is a very poignant aspect to the ending that is true in spirit to the mingling of comedy and tragedy in Moliere's life. And we get to see a lot of the scenes from earlier played out on stage by the troupe (in Marie-Antoinette's little theatre, with Philippe d'Orleans, the troupe's patron, front and center in the audience).

All of the acting is really fantastic. Romain Duris gives an acting lesson about how to act like a horse in which he explains that different horses have different personalities, and proceeds to show three very different possibilities, with total commitment. And everyone else has the difficult task of playing all of Moliere's types in one character. Ludivine Sagnier as Celimene and Laura Morante as Elmire are particularly delightful.

I really hope this movie comes out in the U.S. It would be a shame if it didn't. I'm going to have to find a way to own it on DVD someday. I think it would be a really useful teaching tool, at least for the way I teach.