The most ruthless way of gauging to what degree a classic play is really timeless may be to set it in the present and watch where its pieces tumble. “La Petite Lili,” the French filmmaker Claude Miller’s ingeniously freewheeling adaptation of “The Seagull,” drags Chekhov’s 1895 play into the age of cellphones, digital video and hip-hop. In doing so, it stirs up a fascinating and contradictory mixture of the eternal and the transitory.
As much as Chekhov understood the human heart, he could barely have imagined the kinds of freedom of choice, along with the physical and social mobility, that allow contemporary lives second and third acts. Nor could he foresee our mediawise climate, in which the airing of painful personal secrets, complete with telegenic weeping, would become mass entertainment. Character may still be destiny in art and life, but nowadays that destiny has more to do with underlying spiritual baggage than with choices no longer set in stone.
The characters in Mr. Miller’s contemporary, bracingly optimistic adaptation have the power to reinvent themselves and to use art to forestall tragedy. Catharsis and healing are available to all. If that makes life seem cheaper, Mr. Miller suggests, it also makes it better.
For its first two-thirds, “La Petite Lili,” much of it set around a gorgeous lakeside estate in Brittany, is a skillful condensation of Chekhov that transposes the characters from 19th-century Russia to 21st-century rural France. Without changing their personalities, it shifts them from the worlds of literature and theater into filmmaking. The film is beautifully cast. Arkadina, Chekhov’s imperious theatrical diva, is now Mado (Nicole Garcia), a narcissistic, age-obsessed Gallic movie star with hawklike features and a short temper. Her lover, the writer Trigorin, has metamorphosed into Brice (Bernard Giraudeau), a successful, jaded writer-director with a roving eye.
Arkadina’s volatile son Konstantin has become Julien (Robinson Stévenin), a fiercely idealistic experimental filmmaker with burning eyes and Alain Delon cheekbones. Nina is Lili (Ludivine Sagnier), a naïve, aspiring starlet and delectable, curly-headed blonde who abruptly forsakes Julien once she meets Brice, whom she instantly recognizes as her ticket to the glamorous life.
The film’s sharpest moments involve the combative, emotionally incestuous relationship of Mado and Julien. The mother both adores and despises her son, who reminds her of her advancing age and whose ferocious idealism is a continual rebuke to her commercial savvy. Her vicious response to a lovely but gloomy experimental film he shows is to dismiss it as “a provincial Bergman ripoff,” and she describes her son as a “pretentious little fool, boring us silly.”
For all its spikiness, there are hurdles that “La Petite Lili” cannot overcome. Abridged and abbreviated, Chekhov’s leisurely philosophic reflections evoke a musty aroma of pressed flowers in a scrapbook that is out of tune with the times. The rush to abridge leaves little room for what’s left to seep into your bones.
But “La Petite Lili” pays off in a revelatory final act in which many of the original characters converge several years later on a movie set to recreate the events we have already seen. It would be giving away too much to name who is behind the camera and who is in the cast, except to say that as the actors and filmmakers become scrambled, “La Petite Lili” becomes a Pirandellian puzzle reminiscent of Truffaut’s “Day for Night.” It argues that people, given the opportunity, move on and mature, their memories intact but their wounds healing.
About the Filmmaker
Producer / director / writer Claude Miller studied at the IDHEC film school in Paris from 1962 through 1963, acting as assistant and supervisor in the crews of many notable directors of France’s Novelle Vague, including Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.
Under Truffaut’s aegis Miller directed three shorts and his first feature film in 1976, The Best Way to Walk. Miller completed several more features and script adaptations with the perceptible influence of his mentor, and after Truffaut’s death in 1984, Miller completed the filming of Truffaut’s half-completed The Little Thief in 1988. Miller has since fully come into his own, and has helmed such critically-acclaimed films as The Class Trip (1998), Under Suspicion (2000), and Betty Fisher and other Stories (2001).
La Petite Lili (2004)
Directed by: Claude Miller
Starring: Ludivine Sagnier, Robinson Stévenin, Nicole Garcia, Bernard Giraudeau, Julie Depardieu, Yves Jacques, Anne Le Ny, Marc Betton, Maylie Del Piero, Mathieu Grondin
Screenplay by: Julien Boivent, Claude Miller (Based on the “The Seagull” by Anton Chekhov)
Production Design by: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko
Cinematography by: Gérard de Battista
Film Editing by: Véronique Lange
Costume Design by: Christel Birot, Jacqueline Bouchard
Distributed by: First Run Features
Release Date: November 12, 2004
Visits: 333
