A near-classic comes to Blu-ray: Véra Belmont's crass 'n classy MARQUISE

Among those famous French actresses who, down the decades, barely seem to age, Sophie Marceau runs a very close second to the champion, Isabelle Adjani. You can now view Ms Marceau -- whose grace and beauty has always surmounted her acting skills, though she is certainly a decent enough performer -- in a 1997 comic/historical costume melodrama entitled MARQUISE.

Based (somewhat loosely, I'm sure) on the life of dancer/actress Marquise-Thérèse de Gorla, the movie opens delightfully/naughtily as the theater troupe of a certain M. Molière arrives in a small town, where the female performers desperately need to find a loo. A lovely and innocent-looking young child leads them to the public toilet and makes some good money for her trouble -- in a surprising manner.

As directed and co-written by the French filmmaker Véra Belmont, shown right, with whose work TrustMovies is completely unfamiliar, the movie is an eye-popping delight to view regarding costumes, production design and all else visual, thanks to Ms Belmont and her cinematographer (Jean-Marie Dreujou).

As they wander the town, Molière (brought to fine life and a rather remarkable facial resemblance by Bernard Giraudeau) and one of his best comic actors, Gros-René (the film's standout performance and its emotional center, Patrick Timsit), come upon a very attractive young woman dancing on a platform before a spellbound crowd. When it begins to rain, the crowd disperses, but not our two guys. Tracking down the dancer, they find that her father whores her out for money, and before you can say, "Come to Paris with our little troupe," she is married to Gros-René and is finding her way to fame and fortune.

Along the way, she and we meet the likes of cultural icons from Molière to Racine (Lambert Wilson, below, center), Lully (Remo Girone), and the aging actor Floridor (played by Lambert's dad, Georges) -- all vying for the favor of the ruling monarch Louis XIV (Thierry Lhermitte, below, left) who is, along with everyone else, smitten by our Marquise.

The ups and downs/ins and outs of our dancer-and-soon-to-be actress' rise are both believable (relatively) and entertaining (very), and by the time we get to the poisoned chocolates and some 17th Century All About Eve conniving, you should be properly amused and perhaps even moved.
I certainly was.

Running 116 minutes and released to DVD and Blu-ray by Film Movement Classics, Marquise (a French/Italian/Spanish co-production) hits the street this coming Tuesday, March 12 -- for purchase and (eventually, one hopes) streaming rental.

Lee Liberman's streaming tip -- Duff/Hardy in Milne/Giedroyc's ELIZABETH I: VIRGIN QUEEN

This emotionally absorbing version of the life of Elizabeth I (BBC/PBS Boston, 2005) begs attention to its lead, distinguished British actress Anne-Marie Duff. Among her many credits, Duff starred in Shameless (series streaming on Netflix); had a supporting role as a whiney social-climber in the BBC2/HBO mini-series, Parade's End; and she just ended a run at NYC's Lincoln Center as a glamorous Lady MacBeth opposite Ethan Hawke's MacBeth.

In Elizabeth I: the Virgin Queen, Duff (shown at left) dazzles and convinces compared to other Elizabeth's -- more so than Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchett, or Helen Mirren, for instance. Although credit or debit goes to the actor, the writing is all important, Duff has said; her Queen is a brilliant living creation rather than a scripted historical figure. Some find Duff histrionic but her view of her job is to embrace the truth of each person she plays -- likeable or not. Here, she dazzles while being difficult and appearing plain.

This re-imagining of Elizabeth's gleaming tenure hangs on a love story -- that of her intense relationship with childhood friend and advisor, Robert Dudley -- rather than on an orderly chronology of events. Major events reveal her personality -- the shrewd, coy, jealous, manipulative, vain, and absolutely devoted head of state. One running theme is her advisors' dogged efforts to get her to marry. Elizabeth used those years to improve her domination over the male power structure by pitting suitors and courtiers against each other for her favor, gradually creating a cult of personality as "Virgin Queen" married to her people. This circumvented her privy council's marriage imperative while also providing a steady diet of the adoration she must have craved as Henry VIII's out-of-favor child. Above all she sabotaged any effort to interfere with her supremacy ("I will have no man rule over me").

One reviewer called the production "a hodge-podge treatise on sexual frustration", but Elizabeth had plenty of motive to avoid marriage, her father having decapitated her mother, Anne Boleyn, and set upon her many step-mothers. Her defensive armor against marriage "comes at the price of a cold bed', warned Dudley, who wanted to marry her and whom she dangled for years even though she loved him. Played by a seductive Tom Hardy (at right and further above), Dudley stayed at her side during his two marriages until his death, leaving Elizabeth bereft and miserable. (His role as Dudley was a star turn for Hardy, who lately fills his dance card in Hollywood blockbuster and B-list movie parts.)

But as attractive as Tom Hardy's Dudley, the production sells short the real Robert Dudley, writing him as a boy-toy whom Elizabeth promoted and enriched in order to keep close rather than as the statesman he was. The Dudley of history came from ruined nobility but used Elizabeth's patronage to foster the Renaissance. He was a patron of all the arts, scholarship, exploration, a modern business entrepreneur, and a master at foreign policy and war -- in short a fit advisor and companion for his brilliant Queen. The real Dudley's role in the Renaissance is worth knowing and there's no inkling of it here.

Whatever the flaws in this barreling narrative, all are outweighed by the sheer force of Duff's Elizabeth and the poignancy of her frustrated relationships. One admires how the girl outwits and bends the forces against her, how the woman triumphs, suffers loss, and endures the indignities of aging. At her death, we ourselves are bereaved. Her last advisor Robert Cecil tells us: "Then the flame was extinguished and she began to slip away from us. Too weak to walk, she has spent the last 15 hours standing in her chamber, refusing to sit, lest she never rise again..." (middle fingers drawn across her mouth like a child seeking comfort.) "Then after 40 years as sovereign, she quietly departed this life."

Paula Milne, writer (shown at right), and Coky Giedroyc, director, (shown below) score a triumph making Elizabeth's life and eccentricities imaginable and their plucking the extraordinary Anne-Marie Duff out of the firmament of fine actresses to get the job done. The pulsing, haunting score deserves special mention, a combination of medieval and Celtic songs and chants sung by The Mediaeval Baebes and The London Bulgarian Choir, among others.

Now that Elizabeth's story has been told over and over, it could be time to explore this period through the man who sat close to power and used his own to nurture the institutions that produced a Golden Age. That would be Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, himself, a very original Renaissance man. Elizabeth I: Virgin Queen, running just under four hours, is available now on DVD and streaming from Netflix or via Amazon and Amazon Instant Video.

This post was written by TrustMovies' guest columnist, 

Lee Liberman, who will be joining us 

now and again to cover various films.

DVDebut worth noting: Salvador Litvak's unusual and beautiful SAVING LINCOLN

Hitting the street on DVD tomorrow, June 18, is one of the more interesting and provocative (regarding its film technique, at least) movies to have appeared this year: SAVING LINCOLN. The film, directed by Salvador Litvak, utilizes a new film-making technique – CineCollage, which makes use of actual Civil War photos (from the Library of Congress) for the green screen backdrops in every scene. Based on fact, the story follows U.S. Marshall Ward Hill Lamon as he shadows Abraham Lincoln as his bodyguard during the Civil War, and it offers everything from Lincoln's love of music and song to his wife's need for a good seance now and then.

Well-acted and -directed and relatively well-written, the movie's a salve for those of us who found the Spielberg feel-good version overlong, over-done and way overproduced. This is small potatoes, budget-wise but its use of the green screen and those wonderful photographs makes for a kind of pageant-like production that is often oddly moving and sometimes wonderfully strange.

My full review of the film when it opened this past winter can be found here.

Salvador Litvak's green-screened SAVING LINCOLN plumbs Abe's bond to Hill Lamon

"The better part of one's life consists of his friendships," is the quote by Abraham Lincoln that opens the new film, SAVING LINCOLN, a surprise of sorts from Salvador Litvak, last seen dishing up the crass but pretty funny Jewish family comedy When Do We Eat?  As he was not invited to see the current Spielberg/Kushner take on our 16th President (at this point in time, he'll wait for the Blu-ray to appear), TrustMovies has to say that he was surprised, charmed, moved and held fast by Litvak's and his co-writer Nina Davidovich's odd mixture of a movie. (The above quote is apropos because the film deals with the rela-tionship of Lincoln to Ward Hill Lamon (rhymes with Damon, of Damon & Pythias, as a song of the time makes clear), who was Abe's best friend and valued protector during his Presidency.)

What sets Saving Lincoln rather spectacularly apart, however, is the manner in which it has been filmed. Using all its actors working against a single green-screen stage, Mr. Litvak (shown at right) and his special-effects people have somehow "composited" the result into a kind of 3D environment of vintage black-and-white photographs from our Civil War era. The result is both artful and beautiful, with the actors appearing in a kind of tamped-down color, and always in quite the right proportion, against these photos. The movie is like watching a storybook unfolding, full of important facts and events and people and ideas, put forward as a kind of historical pageant. Yet it is never stolid or boring. Thanks to some excellent acting from all concerned, the events shown spring to life.

How much better in all ways (except, I would image, its upcoming box-office take), is this film to something like the also-green-screened 300 -- in which abs, attitude and uber-violence are front and center, while history is fucked over and appallingly boring backdrops are paraded incessantly before us. The backdrops here, these wonderful photographs, are used so well and imaginatively that the movie, I think, may find a permanent place in memory.

Something else I appreciated, though others may not, is the fact that Mr. Lincoln (a terrific performance from Tom Amandes, above, right) is not deified. He is shown to be very bright, caring and politically astute but also given to whims (attending a seance at the behest of his wife-- well-played by Penelope Ann Miller). And while there is a definite homo-erotic tension between him and his friend Hill, nothing faintly homosexual should disturb any highly-conservative Lincoln lovers.

As I say, the acting here is often splendid, never more so than in scenes like the one between Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, his wife's maid (the fine and moving Saidah Arrika Ekulona) sparked by the death of the Lincolns' son and addressing the man's faith, or lack of it, in god. Another good, if brief performance comes from Bruce Davison, above, as William H. Seward. Also wrenching is an amputation performed in a military hospital (below) using only the tools on hand in a more medically primitive time.

A note, too, should be made regarding the excellent choice of music in the film -- from the banjo and singing that early unite Lincoln and Hill Lamon to the rendition of Dixie that the President insists on having sung after the Civil War has been won by the North, no doubt as a kind of move toward proper reconstruction.

Despite its sense of pageantry, the movie does not slight (in fact, it pushes this front and center) the huge and ghastly number of lives of young Americans lost to the Civil War against the need to win -- and soon -- at all costs. The film also suggests, without making too much of it, that Lincoln may well have been aware than his time was at hand, now that he had accomplished what was necessary for the country.

The movie's weakest link -- oddly enough, given the quotation that begins it -- is the relationship between Lincoln and Lamon. Despite a good performance from Lea Coco (above, right, from Dorian Blues) in the latter's role, we never get much more than that aforementioned music as the bond, together with Lamon forever warning the Prez not to go out unaccompanied. I realize that what we do get -- the war, the necessary politics, the loss of a child -- is important, but a little more of what truly bonded these two men, even if imaginatively created out of whole cloth, would have been appropriate and appreciated.

Saving Lincoln, a sad and humane pageant via Pictures from the Fringe and running 101 minutes, plays one night on Lincoln's Birthday, this Tuesday, February 12, in Washington DC, and then hits New York City (at the Quad Cinema) and Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Music Hall) this Friday, February 15, with further openings in cities around the rest of the country to follow. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.