Un dimanche à la campagne (1984) - film review

Monsieur Ladmiral is an ageing painter who lives alone in his large country house, cared for by his loyal housekeeper Mercédès.  Every Sunday, his middle-aged son Gonzague comes to visit him with his wife and three young children.  Late one summer in 1912, the sober family get-together is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of Ladmiral’s free-spirited daughter Irène...

Un dimanche à la campagne is one of director Bertrand Tavernier’s most personal and introspective films, an understated yet intensely engaging reflection on mortality and the trauma of growing old.  It is a sensitively crafted adaptation of the novella Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir by Pierre Bost, who is best known for his work as a screenwriter.  In collaboration with Jean Aurenche, Bost scripted such classics of French cinema as Le Diable au corps (1946), L’Auberge rouge (1951) and Jeux interdits (1952), and later worked on two of Tavernier’s early films: L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (1974) and Le Juge et l’assassin (1976).  The film won Tavernier the Best Director award at Cannes in 1984, and was nominated for eight Césars, winning in the categories of Best Actress (Sabine Azéma), Best Cinematography and Best Adapted Screenplay.  

What makes this such a particularly memorable film is the remarkably poignant and true-to-life central performance by 73-year-old Louis Ducreux, who plays the lead character, the aged Monsieur Ladmiral, with exquisite charm and subtlety.   A distinguished stage actor, Ducreux made surprisingly few cinema appearances and this was to be his only major screen role; he would later have a smaller part in Tavernier’s subsequent Daddy Nostalgie (1990), just before his death in 1992.  Ducreux’s engaging portrayal of an old man finding himself ever detached from the world around him evokes memories of Carlo Battisti’s legendary performance in Vittorio De Sica’s similarly themed masterpiece Umberto D. (1952).  The impressive supporting cast includes Sabine Azéma and Michel Aumont, who are perfectly chosen to play Ladmiral’s chalk and cheese offspring.  Tavernier would later cast Azéma for the female lead in his acclaimed epic La Vie et rien d’autre (1989), thereby establishing her as one of French cinema’s leading actresses.

A mesmerising little film that lacks the blockbuster scale and pretensions of Tavernier’s grander works, Un dimanche à la campagne is content merely to reflect on the one great tragedy of human existence, that of growing old and having to accept one’s mortality.  Whilst the elderly Monsieur Ladmiral knows that he is loved by his children and grandchildren, he knows also that he is separated from them by a gulf of understanding.  He belongs to the past; he is a faded relic that has no place in the modern world of 1912.  He cannot understand what his nearest and dearest say to him, nor can he make himself understood by them.  Ladmiral’s evident physical isolation is compounded by a growing sense of emotional estrangement.  His one consolation is his art, which allows him to conjure up the shadow if not the substance of life as his own time-worn existence slowly crumbles to dust.

Monsieur Ladmiral’s two grown-up children are complete opposites: a son who is a successful businessman and family man, and a frivolous daughter who gads about like a mad thing pursued by sadistic hornets.  Although Ladmiral loves them equally, he clearly has a greater affinity for his daughter Irène.  She may be egoistical and visits him only infrequently, but she has that quality of vitality and spontaneity that her brother lacks.  It is the same quality that Ladmiral tries to bring to his paintings as he seeks to capture the fleeting impressions of life at its most vibrant and evanescent.  Travernier’s cinematographer Bruno de Keyzer manages to reproduce the same impressionistic style in his photography, the sun-dappled garden setting and crowded country guingette instantly bringing to mind the work of the great impressionist painters Renoir, Cézanne and Monet.   The film’s languorous pace has the character of a sultry summer afternoon, hours of leisurely ennui punctured by moments of intense emotion.  Yet beyond the comforting impression of the happy family reunion there is a deeper sense of melancholia and regret.  One old man’s life is nearing its end, and as he faces up to his own imminent demise he sees his own descendents thriving like summer blossoms, ignorant of the cold and cruel winter that awaits them.

© James Travers 2011

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?