The King of Paris
France/UK 1993
Reviewed by Michael Witt
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Paris, 1930. Victor Derval is feted as the king of the Parisian stage. Derval meets an aspiring Hungarian actress called Lisa Lanska and falls in love with her. Through his involvement in the newfangled talkies at the Joinville sound studios, Derval secures Lisa a small film. role. She graduates from lover to live-in secretary-cum-mistress and attracts the attentions of Derval's son Paul, an impecunious would-be revolutionary poet. Paul and Lisa become lovers.
To Paul's consternation, Derval's long-suffering pet playwright Romain Coste writes a role for Lisa into his new play The Lost Girl. Chancing on Lisa in an embrace with his father, Paul kills himself. The show goes ahead, receives a rapturous reception and launches Lisa into the limelight. Its run is cut short, however: in the wake of Paul's death, Lisa is unable to stomach Derval. Coste, himself enamoured with the actress, abandons Derval and pens a star vehicle for Lisa that plays to packed houses. Unbeknown to Coste, Lisa, following a triumphant screen test for MGM, leaves for Hollywood. Driven by feelings of betrayal, Derval and Coste conspire together to sabotage Lisa's success.
Review
From the outset first-time feature director Dominique Maillet's The King of Paris functions unashamedly as popular, nostalgic period melodrama. But the many references to cinema history indicate loftier goals. To begin with, the film is dedicated to Max Ophuls, and its very title reprises those of a number of films made between the 1910s and end of the 30s, notably Leo Mittler's 1930 Le Roi de Paris. Maillet also draws on and quotes films that have sought to explore the possibilities of cinema through their representations of theatre: the improvised liberties taken by Derval with Coste's scripts, for instance, are borrowed directly from Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (1945).
This desire to reference film history is confirmed through the film's representations of the arrival of sound cinema ("that monstrous invention," as Derval predictably calls it), the US presence at the Joinville studios, and the rapid cross-fertilisation between theatre and the talkies. On the one hand, Derval's roots in the theatre and hesitant embrace of the new form evoke a figure such as the flamboyant actor, director and playwright, Sacha Guitry, who made the transition from theatre to cinema in the 30s. On the other, the film's concern for period detail, attention to set design and complex, fluid camera movements self-consciously recall the seminal early sound experiments of René Clair (Sous les toits de Paris, 1930) where the director demonstrated so eloquently that sound cinema didn't necessarily imply just 'talking pictures'. More than this, its depiction of the film-making process recalls Clair's loving homage to the heyday of the silent era, Le Silence est d'or (1947).
Given such esteemed company, Maillet's project comes across as hopelessly clumsy. The potential of the film's enormously rich raw material - Paris, the 30s, theatre, cinema - is quickly reduced to a pedestrian tour through stock clichés: the decorative misunderstood young anarchist, a jazz club, "the new mania for sea-bathing". The film's imagination is second-hand, its recycling of the familiar strongly reminiscent of television costume-drama where we have come to accept images of lonely waifs selling roses along the fog-shrouded banks of the Seine. For much of the time mise en scène is subsumed within a rather directionless concern for production design. When money has been invested in period detail, that detail is pushed in our faces: at one point a steamer lowers its folding chimney as it passes under a bridge and the film pauses to gawk, admire and reminisce.
To succeed even at the level of a run-of-the-mill feel-good melodrama the script would have to be tauter and the film shorter. The performances are largely unengaging, too. Manuel Blanc does his best in the thinly written role of Derval's son Paul and Philippe Noiret as Derval is at his most mechanical. Such experienced performers as Paulette Dubost, who plays Derval's dresser at Joinville, struggle with such lines as "the talkies won't last long." The predictability of the plot and dialogue are such that we can only encourage them along or sit and cringe as we see them coming.
Credits
- Director
- Dominique Maillet
- Producer
- Jean Gontier
- Screenplay
- Jacques Fieschi
- Jérôme Tonnerre
- Director of Photography
- Bernard Lutic
- Editor
- Marie Castro
- Production Designer
- Jacques Rouxel
- Music
- Quentin Damamme
- ©Rio
- Production Companies
- Rio presents a co-production with Adventure Pictures (London) and with the participation of European Coproduction Fund/Canal+/soficas Sofinergie 2 & 3 and Cofimage 5/Centre National de la
- Cinématographie and the support of Procirep
- Production Managers
- Nicolas Daquet
- Yann Gilbert
- Unit Production Manager
- Eric Bensoussan
- Unit Managers
- Clémentine Thomas
- Bruno Vignier
- Location Managers
- Thierry Rouxel
- Associate:
- Stéphane Cressend
- Damien Fleury
- Production Administrator
- Nora Salhi
- Assistant Directors
- Gabriel Julien Laférrière
- Patrick Boshart
- François Jandin
- Script Supervisor
- Isabelle Perrin-Thévenet
- Written with the collaboration of
- Bernard Minoret
- Dominique Maillet
- Camera Operator
- Gilbert Duhalde
- Special Effects
- Jean-François Cousson
- Set Decorator
- Julie Sfez
- Costume Designer
- Christian Gasc
- Wardrobe
- Piercarlo Foddis
- Florence Sadaune
- Key Make-up
- Eric Pierre
- Odile Fourquin
- Make-up Artist
- Fabienne Robineau
- Key Hairstylist
- Agathe Dupuis
- Hairstylist
- Julien Morières
- Titles
- Ercidan
- Sound
- Michel Desrois
- Mixage
- François Groult
- Sound Editor
- Françoise Coispeau
- Sound Effects
- Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans
- Post-synchronization
- Gilbert Crozet
- Cast
- Philippe Noiret
- Victor Derval
- Michel Aumont
- Marquis de Castellac
- Manuel Blanc
- Paul Derval, Victor's son
- Veronika Varga
- Lisa Lanska
- Ronny Coutteure
- Emile
- Franco Interlenghi
- Pastorini
- Paulette Dubost
- Raymonde, Victor's dresser
- Sacha Briquet
- Félix Roquépine
- Corinne Cléry
- Betty Favart, an actress
- Jacques Roman
- Romain Coste, a writer
- Fabienne Chaudat
- Angèle
- Bernard Lajarrige
- Champmartin
- Pierre Vial
- minister
- Gaëtan Wenders
- Treplev
- David Gabison
- director "Colonnes"
- Alexandre Chuat
- director
- Gérard Boucaron
- comedy director
- Philippe Tessier
- Machino in "La fille perdue"
- Oguz Janus Lengyel
- duel arbiter
- Francis Bouc
- old 'schnok'
- Cyril Lecomte
- young actor in "La fille perdue"
- Michel Linas
- barman in "La fille perdue"
- Patrick Boshart
- one-armed lance corporal
- Claire Foliot
- Lisa's maid
- Gérard Couderc
- Boulard owner
- Patrick Gourevitch
- brasserie owner
- Alain Conan
- Roquépine's witness
- Victoire Le Corre
- the bachelor girl
- Fred Kiriloff
- eccentric
- Catherine Hirsch
- Macha
- Max Delor
- wealthy man
- Dominique Ollivier
- cemetery keeper
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Gala Film Distributors
- 9,189 feet
- 102 minutes 6 seconds
- In Colour
- Subtitles
- French theatrical title
- Le Roi de Paris