Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Bertrand Usclat, Martin Darondeau
Starring: Pauline Clément, Laurent Stocker, Julien Frison, Marina Hands, Adeline D'Hermy, Danièle Lebrun
"Keep the name of The Scottish Play outta your flipping mouth!" Like 9/11, we all remember where we were when we saw/heard about the slap which shook Hollywood. I was scrolling the next morning, probably more interested in seeing the red-carpet dresses (Penélope Cruz and Jess Chastain up for awards that year) than handbags, but, let's be real, apart from high fashion adorned by our mothers, Will Smith's embarrassing tantrum was the most interesting thing about the Academy Awards since ever. Yet still, what was perhaps overlooked in the ensuing dissection of Big Willie's mentalism is that just previously to his freak out, the award for Best Cinematography was announced, with, wait for it, Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth amongst the nominees. Coincidence? Evoking the very play which has been associated with superstition and backstage bad luck since its first performance in 1606 (in a private show for King James. And what Oscar did the erstwhile star of Gemini Man take home that damnable year? Best actor for KING Richard...), and that reputably has a black magic rite coded within its iambs? Outside of the book, you can't vocalise the name of the play in a theatre. Not even the Dolby Theatre. Drama relies on energy in the air, on conjured atmosphere, and bringing bad juju into the equation is inadvisable. Just ask Chris Rock, who mysteriously hasn't presented an award ever since that fated night... Theatrical whimsy, or load of Bardic bollocks? Will Martin Darondeau and Bertrand Usclat's Comédie Française, a light-as-a-brief candle farce which focuses on a beleaguered performance of The Scottish Play, offer solutions to the mind's construction?
The curse of The Scottish Play is the apparent trigger for the series of pratfalls and hitches which threaten a performance of Macbeth's opening night, causing no end of arse ache for director Nina (Pauline Clément), whose day starts off at the wrong end of a jobsworth door security who won't let her in because she hasn't got her badge, despite her being present at the famed Comédie-Française for the best part of six months. It goes from irritating to even worse when, in a moment of complete incredulity, Nina nonchalantly allows the actor playing Lady Macbeth (which, if you haven't seen the play, is a pretty big part - imagine The Devil Wears Prada without Meryl Streep) to quit the production, leaving the company without a leading lady. There is no question of the production shutting down either, as the Comédie-Française, the oldest active theatre company in the world, just doesn't do that (you have to love the French and their absolute commitment to the arts). The show simply has to go on, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune (different play, I know).
Farce always makes me feel uneasy, unpalatable in the way that horror is for others; it's the circumlocution of hapless events, the stop/start broken rhythm of things never getting anywhere. To me, farce is Kafkaesque, and not funny. And while I understand that one must suspend disbelief when engaging with the genre, Comédie Française demands a lot of suspension. The breezy acceptance that a lead player has waltzed off to another, better paid job (with no barely disguised bitterness from the rest of the cast: yeah, alright) notwithstanding, there is also the suggestion that it is only today, on the final rehearsal, where the curse of Macbeth is mentioned: after months of rehearsal with surely the most seasoned stage actors in the whole of France. The expository set up is breezily perfunctory, with the result that the humour lacks an anchor and the viable stakes which determine the comedy.
We are duly introduced to the players and their various comic foibles. Macbeth has his own ideas about how the play should go, which includes Nazi iconography (not a bad shout, tbh); Lady Macduff is married to the lead but secretly having it off with Fleance (this, at least, is very accurate to backstage shenanigans); one of the weird sisters is a woman of a certain age who enjoys getting stoned before performances (an old person? Smoking weed? C'est fou!). The jokes write themselves. But part of the issue is that from the opening gags Comédie Française is heightened and hyperbolic, and the performances so big, that the consequence, ramped up from the beginning, has nowhere left to go, and, well, the potential comedy overleaps itself to fall upon the other.
As the centre of the film, Clément, whose character has to take on the role of Lady Macbeth, is watchable and convincing, providing some gravity and tying together the various sit-com situations. Such as a further escalation which occurs when Nina's baby is dumped at the theatre by her estranged partner. Even within the broad giggles of Comédie Française, you would hope that there would be some satirical mileage in perceived expectations of mothers and fathers, but instead the inconvenient infant is simply a lead in for a set piece involving the hydraulic mechanism designed for Banquo's ghost. Perhaps it's an unfair expectation that a frothy (and impossible to dislike) pantomime would take on structural sexism, but of all Shakespeare's plays Macbeth is the most enduringly confrontational in its presentation of gender. Furthermore, the curse aside, it is hard to see why Comédie Française chose The Scottish Play as a narrative base. Why not one of the more farcical entries in the Folios? Much Ado About Nothing or A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been more fitting analogues to this film's rising absurdity and optimistic spirit. As it is, the sound and fury of Comédie Française ultimately signifies very little.
Comédie Française is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 9th.
