A sensational performance by Sylvie Testud is the singular reason to catch this rambling biopic of Françoise Sagan - bestselling novelist, high-rolling playgirl, multiple addict, flamboyant bisexual, monstre sacré - which plays in repertory throughout April at the French Institute's Ciné Lumière. Testud, one of France's best young actresses (also currently to be seen illuminating Lourdes as a desperate young pilgrim), takes no prisoners in her electrifying account of the writer's train wreck of a life over half a century, from the precocious literary star who stormed the world in 1954, aged 19, with Bonjour Tristesse to her death, raddled, bitter, broke and alone, in 2004.
Part of the present crusade of the French cinema to commemorate the country's rackety national treasures, the movie itself is rather more traditional in approach than La Vie en Rose, Coco Before Chanel or Gainsbourg (vie héroïque), and certainly a good deal more conventional than its subject's own turbulent life. Opening on the reclusive, ailing Sagan shortly before her death from a blood clot, the main narrative then flashes back to a chronological account of the writer's brief, vertiginous rise to fame and her long, extravagant fall from grace thereafter.
En route, there is roulette, industrial-strength smoking, tax evasion, existential ennui, fast cars, addiction to a morphine derivative (which Sagan acquired during hospitalisation for a road accident) and to non-prescription drugs (she was several times charged with cocaine possession), all liberally fuelled with champagne and whisky to plug, Sagan says, the void in her existence: "How I destroy myself is my business," she snaps. It is, in short, a cautionary tale writ large, and underlined by the doomy cadenzas of Armand Amar's sub Michael Nyman-esque score.
The director, Diane Kurys, has some decent credits (Coup de Foudre, A Man in Love, Après l'Amour, A la Folie - do we, perhaps, detect a recurrent theme in her work?) Sagan is more unsatisfactory, most likely because it started life as a two-part, three-hour television movie. Snipped back to 120 minutes, the feature film version feels perfunctory: the key relationships - with Sagan's father, her son, her most important male and female lovers and the carer who accompanied her to the end - are fudged, and Testud, domineering and fragile, cynical yet incurably romantic, and bearing an astonishing physical resemblance to the original, effortlessly bestrides every scene.
The one thing you won't learn much about at all is Sagan's work. That's partly due to the nature of her trade: the tap-tap of vintage typewriter keys is inherently less dramatic than fashion or chansons. Still, one would have welcomed just a little more of the corrosive wit and wisdom of the woman who wrote such aphorisms as "A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you," or "Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves."
En route, there is roulette, industrial-strength smoking, tax evasion, existential ennui, fast cars, addiction to a morphine derivative (which Sagan acquired during hospitalisation for a road accident) and to non-prescription drugs (she was several times charged with cocaine possession), all liberally fuelled with champagne and whisky to plug, Sagan says, the void in her existence: "How I destroy myself is my business," she snaps. It is, in short, a cautionary tale writ large, and underlined by the doomy cadenzas of Armand Amar's sub Michael Nyman-esque score.
The director, Diane Kurys, has some decent credits (Coup de Foudre, A Man in Love, Après l'Amour, A la Folie - do we, perhaps, detect a recurrent theme in her work?) Sagan is more unsatisfactory, most likely because it started life as a two-part, three-hour television movie. Snipped back to 120 minutes, the feature film version feels perfunctory: the key relationships - with Sagan's father, her son, her most important male and female lovers and the carer who accompanied her to the end - are fudged, and Testud, domineering and fragile, cynical yet incurably romantic, and bearing an astonishing physical resemblance to the original, effortlessly bestrides every scene.
The one thing you won't learn much about at all is Sagan's work. That's partly due to the nature of her trade: the tap-tap of vintage typewriter keys is inherently less dramatic than fashion or chansons. Still, one would have welcomed just a little more of the corrosive wit and wisdom of the woman who wrote such aphorisms as "A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you," or "Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves."
- Sagan plays in repertory at the French Institute's Ciné Lumière from today. Click here for details.
- Find Françoise Sagan's books on Amazon.
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