THE STORY – During a Paris rebellion, young Louis XIV must be hidden and is secretly replaced at court by a look-alike. Entrusted to the musketeer-poet Cyrano de Bergerac, Louis is sheltered within Madeleine’s traveling theater troupe, where the actor and aspiring playwright Molière has just joined – unaware their newest member is the future king. As Cyrano struggles to handle the arrogant and clumsy young king, he begins writing a bold play for the troupe. Molière, bursting with ideas, transforms the work with wit and heart, awakening his genius for comedy and deepening his secret feelings for Madeleine, while young Louis discovers the joy of theater and the power of friendship. In Paris, intrigue is brewing – can the young king return in time and embrace his true royal destiny?
THE CAST – Artus, Julia Piaton, Franck Dubosc, Némo Schiffman, Xavier Robic & Doria Tillier
THE TEAM – Michel Leclerc (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
While introducing the world premiere of his new movie at the Cannes Film Festival, Michel Leclerc (a director of fairly successful French comedies) said he wanted to take a break from his usual stuff, set in the present and dealing with topical subjects, and thus decided to do a sort of 17th-century equivalent of “The Avengers” (his words). And while “Molière, Cyrano and the Young King” is unlikely to become a worldwide phenomenon like Joss Whedon’s superhero film was, the comparison does paint a pretty accurate picture of the character dynamics at play, and its speaks to the enduring popularity of the movie’s protagonists in French culture (one of them, D’Artagnan, proved this not too long ago in Martin Bourboulon’s “Three Musketeers” two-parter).
The opening title card states that what we’re about to see is a true story. “Except to historians”, goes the punchline, immediately setting the stage for the creative license Leclerc brings to the table. There’s an air of rebellion in Paris, causing Anne of Austria (Doria Tillier) to decide to hide her son, the future sovereign Louis XIV (Niels Hamel-Brochen). The task is given to the now aged D’Artagnan (Franck Dubosc), who in turn asks for assistance from his friend, the swordsman and poet Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (Artus). The latter comes up with the idea of concealing Louis among the members of an itinerant theater company, run by Cyrano’s friend Madeleine Béjart (Julia Piaton). While this adventure is not without its bumps, due to Louis struggling with the new lifestyle imposed upon him and Cyrano clashing with the actor Jean-Baptiste Poquelin aka Molière (Nemo Schiffman), things are not much easier at court, where Anne realizes the Louis lookalike recruited to impersonate her son has a few layers of vulgarity to shed before anyone will be fooled…
Clearly, there’s a lot to deal with, and the jokes come thick and fast. They range from the obvious, such as Cyrano’s famously large nose, to the more obscure: Molière and Madeleine are shown debating the pros and cons of the Commedia dell’arte, an Italian theater style rooted in stock characters and improvisation, which is where Molière cut his teeth as a performer before innovating the French stage tradition with his own writings (foreshadowed through dialogue). A modicum of knowledge of the language is recommended to fully appreciate the verbal humor, as the subtitles in English – at least the ones used for the festival screening this writer attended – can’t always convey the intricacies of the wordplay that is a natural component of a script pairing Cyrano and Molière, two people who were well known for their creative use of the idiom (with the latter sometimes accused of plagiarizing the former).
Fortunately, there’s also plenty of slapstick involving swordfights, at times a more exaggerated version of similar scenes in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, which were already funny in their own right. Dubosc, who relishes the opportunity to play a slightly washed-up version of D’Artagnan, makes up for his relatively scant screentime (he receives the “and” credit) with a hefty dose of charm and energy, to the point one almost wishes they were watching a different film where he’s on more equal footing with Artus, Piaton and Schiffman, whose chemistry helps sell the image of the itinerant performers.
And yet, for all their achievements, a first-time actor manages to outperform every single one of them: Niels Hamel-Brochen, aged 14, does sterling work in his dual role as Louis and the butcher boy, putting a slightly more foul-mouthed spin on the classic “prince and the pauper” switcheroo. While the film’s English title refers to the ensemble nature of the piece, the original French “Les caprices de l’enfant Roi” (literally “The Whims of the Child King”) gives a clearer idea of who has the most complete arc throughout the film and, pretty much immediately, steals the show with a breezy cocktail of childlike innocence and hammy arrogance (one gag about the parallels with a famous present day French politician drew the biggest laughs at my screening).
Ultimately, despite the presence of Cyrano and Molière, the film is not as clever as it thinks it is. But it’s still a pretty good time, with talented comedic actors handled by a director who knows how and when to place the gags to make sure the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, keeping it lively for the duration of its nearly two-hour runtime (incidentally, don’t leave during the credits, which contain some additional humorous scenes). There’s actual effort on display, which is not always a given with big-star comedies, maybe because the biggest star of them all is one still in the making, a child king with a bright path ahead of him.
