L’Autre Dumas (2010) - film review

Everyone knows that Alexandre Dumas is one of the giants of French literature, the author of such works as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo.   What is less well-known is that many of Dumas’s great novels were written in collaboration with another writer, Auguste Maquet.  To preserve his anonymity and allow Dumas to take the full credit for their work, Maquet was paid off with a substantial fee.  When Dumas is at the height of his literary success, Maquet is mistaken for the renowned author by one of his admirers, a young woman named Charlotte Desrives.  Although he is happily married, Maquet cannot help falling in love with Charolotte and decides to keep up the deception so that he can begin an affair with her.  To prove his love, Maquet, a devoted loyalist, must use Dumas’s influence so that Charlotte’s father, a republican, can be released from prison.  As the 1848 revolution gets underway in Paris, Dumas and his ghost are about to come to blows...

A month before Roman Polanski’s The Ghost was released in the spring of 2010, French cinema audiences were acquainted with an even less probable scenario about a ghost writer and his morally deficient employer.  Whilst Polanski’s film is entirely fictional (although obviously inspired by real events), L’Autre Dumas is based on fact, the fruitful but fraught relationship between the legendary French writer Alexandre Dumas and his hired hand Auguste Maquet.  It is now recognised that Maquet did the lion’s share of the work on around 20 novels which he and Dumas collaborated on from 1844 to 1851, not only doing all of the research (in meticulous detail) but also developing story ideas and sketching out the initial drafts.  No one knows for certain how much of his novels Dumas actually wrote, but we do know that he took 100 per cent of the credit and earned a ticket to the Panthéon whilst his ghost writer remained in comparative obscurity, both in life and in death.  L’Autre Dumas provides a tantalising insight into one of the most fascinating literary partnerships in history, but it falls short of its potential and raises far more questions than it answers.
 
With its authentic recreation of the world in which Dumas lived, the film can hardly be faulted on its production values.  It is a lavish production, based on the stage play Signé Dumas by Cyril Gely and Eric Rouquette, first performed in 2003. Its director is Safy Nebbou, whose previous film, the intense psychological thriller L’Empreinte (2008), has been widely acclaimed.  The inspired touch that Nebbou showed on his last film is noticeably lacking in this, far grander period piece, which falls uncomfortably between a serious character-centric drama and one of those populist historical romps which has become fashionable over the past decade.  Apart from one or two eye-popping set-pieces, Nebbou’s mise-en-scène is lacklustre and as prone to cliché as the even less laudable screenwriting, which is needlessly vulgar and so lacking in depth that Dumas is virtually reduced to a caricature of a modern day celebrity.  Anyone expecting an intelligently scripted drama which makes a serious attempt to unpick Dumas’s relationship with his ghost writer risks being seriously disappointed by this film.
 
If L’Autre Dumas fails in both its direction and scripting, it is massively redeemed by the quality of the acting - you would expect nothing less from such a distinguished cast.  The casting of Gérard Depardieu as Alexandre Dumas proved to be highly controversial (the fact that Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave led many commentators to bemoan the fact that the part was not given to a black actor), but it is hard to imagine any other French thespian fitting the part as well.  The role calls for a larger than life personality, and that is precisely what Depardieu delivers, albeit with somewhat less character depth and sensitivity than the story demands.  Benoît Poelvoorde is a more surprising choice for the part of Dumas’s literary partner Maquet, but his is by far the better performance.  Whereas Depardieu appears content to play Dumas merely as a roaring, lecherous buffoon, Poelvoorde makes a genuine attempt to portray Maquet as a real person, a complex personality torn by divided loyalties and frustrated ambitions.  

The supporting contributions should not be overlooked.  Dominique Blanc, Catherine Mouchet and Mélanie Thierry are all superb - they bring not only a touch of class to the film, but also give it most of its emotional punch and compensate for the shallow portrayal of Dumas.  As laudable as the performances are, however, you are left wondering just what kept Dumas and Maquet together for so long and just how they were able to produce so many literary masterpieces.  Rather than give any deep insight into two immensely problematic characters, the film is content merely to skate on the surface and weave a rather insipid comedy about mistaken identity and professional jealousy.  As grand as the film appears, it is ultimately something of a disappointment, delivering far less than it promises.  However, the meaty performances from an exceptional cast, together with its unfurling of what is probably the most egregious literary deceit in history, make it worth the effort.

© James Travers 2010-2012

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