Melos broke up with the drama – Newspaper Kommersant No. 231 (7432) of 12/13/2022

Serge Bozon’s film Don Juan was released – an attempt to retell in a new way the story of an irresistible seducer who receives a well-deserved punishment for his frivolity. Julia Shagelman I did not find any special revelations in it compared to classical interpretations, and I considered the musical arrangement to be completely superfluous.

As it was sung in the old song, if the bride goes to another, then it is not known who was lucky. This maxim sounds rather vulgar, but the theatrical actor Laurent (Takhar Rahim) did not even have such dubious consolation left: his bride, also an actress, Julie (Virginie Efira) leaves him on the wedding day, when the guests have already gathered for the ceremony, not even for the sake of another man, but for a completely incomprehensible reason. However, director Serge Bozon and his co-writer Axel Roper allow the audience to learn a little more than the hero. We, unlike Laurent, see how Julie drives up to the city hall, albeit late, but ready to tie the knot, in a wedding dress, but turns back, seeing that her fiancé is staring out the window at a woman passing by. Then it turns out that this is a common thing for him, but for the bride this case becomes the last straw.

Thrown at the altar, Laurent reacts to this affront in such a way that the bride’s doubts begin to seem quite justified: he rushes at almost every woman he meets, seeing Julie in them all (the stranger is played by the same Virginie Efira in different wigs and outfits). Sometimes he is lucky, as with a laughing guest of the hotel where the wedding dinner was supposed to take place – our hero spends a consoling night with her. But more often than not: they call him bad names, drive him away or hit him in the face without long conversations – after all, in the modern world, the good old Don Juan tricks and tackles at best look not at all attractive, and at worst are perceived as harassment.

In addition to the literal “reproduction” of the heroine, Bozon uses another technique that emphasizes the deliberate conventionality of what is happening on the screen: he does not pronounce all of Laurent’s communications with women, but sings to the music, although the words in these “arias” are very far from operatic sublimity or musical romance. Such unromantic, down-to-earth musicals are a long tradition in French cinema: here one can recall the classic “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” by Jacques Demy (1964), and “All Songs Only About Love” by Christophe Honoré (2007), and last year’s “Annette” by Léos Carax. Bozon also already addressed this genre in the film France (2007), which was set during the First World War.

In Don Juan, however, they rarely sing, and yet not for everyday reasons, but to emphasize the importance of the moment, so this decision seems to be somehow half-hearted: the authors seem to have not decided to turn the film into a full-fledged musical, and suddenly singing characters look not too organically (especially since the vocal abilities of each of them are rather modest). The composers of the film (there are three of them in the credits) are also, to put it mildly, not Mozart or Michel Legrand, so the musical numbers turned out to be very pale and only distract from the action, and not enhance the (melo) drama unfolding on the screen.

Mozart is remembered for a reason: excerpts from his Don Juan also sound in the soundtrack, as if throwing a bridge from the classic image of the “punished libertine” to its modern incarnation. Present in the picture and the third Don Juan – from the play by Moliere. This role Laurent plays in the theater of the city of Granville, where the stage opens right on the sea. At first, the naive debutante Marina (Louise Ribière) becomes his partner – from the dialogues it can be assumed that Laurent managed to break her heart somewhere behind the scenes. But she can’t handle the role, so the director (Jenny Beth) fires her and invites her to Julie’s Granville, so Laurent gets the chance to see her again in the flesh and not in his fantasies. At first, he is not at all happy about this, but then the lovers are reunited, seemingly ready to forgive each other’s offenses and try to start all over again. However, an experienced viewer does not believe in their happiness, realizing that such a plot cannot do without the Commander.

His part in the film is assigned to a character, in the credits called simply “calm gentleman” (Alain Chamfort). Here he acts in the role of a reasoner, characteristic of the French classical theater: he comments on the actions of the hero and pronounces the author’s point of view on his bad behavior. But he also has his own storyline, which brings tragic notes to the story of the mutual misunderstanding of the sexes. Of course, it is his intervention that eventually leads, albeit not to the physical death of Don Juan-Laurent, but to his complete moral surrender. So, although the women in the new Don Juan have become stronger and more independent in accordance with the trends of the time, their fathers are still more dangerous for frivolous womanizers, according to Serge Bozon.