From “Partners” to “Opening Night”, when the theater makes its cinema
Recently reissued on DVD, “Partners”, the lovely film by Claude d’Anna, is one of those works that have returned to the backstage of the theater world. Spotlight on five films that shed light behind the scenes.
They have played the same piece five hundred times. Not very good, either. He (Jean-Pierre Marielle) was a star of the stage, but is no longer so, eaten away by alcohol, despair and a fault that he cannot forgive himself. It is his wife (Nicole Garcia) who takes the limelight. He revealed her once – she dreamed of playing The Seagull ! – and here it is, today, which magnifies, by its very presence, the imbecile text of a pretentious, celebrated by the critics and – alas! – the audience… Gabriel has only two lines to say in the play – and even then he only says them because Marion has given the author (Michel Duchaussoy) permission to let him say them. So he hangs out in the dressing room where, sometimes, because he has a favor to ask of him, he joins the theater caretaker (Michel Galabru)…
Partners is a pretty bittersweet film, shot in 1984, that Doriane Films has just rescued from oblivion. Claude d’Anna chose to take an interest in actors because the back and forth between illusion and life is constant and fascinating with them. Better than others, but not more, they play a role when they put on a show and cannot quite become themselves again when they find themselves partners in life… Some give in, give up, lock themselves up – like the character of Jean-Pierre Marielle. Others, like Nicole Garcia, are stubborn, reluctant, survive at all costs, without worrying too much about the damage they cause…
Small reminder of films where the artifices of the theater become revealers. Where trompe-l’oeil suddenly reflects the truth.
“Opening Night”, by John Cassavetes (1977)
Those who have seen the film have never forgotten Gena Rowlands (admirable from start to finish) clinging, dead drunk, to the walls of the corridor leading to her dressing room, falling, crawling, getting up, staggering endlessly until the door that leads her to the scene where she is going to ensure – no one knows how, not even her – the performance… We remember less the incredible sequence of the rehearsal where, each time her partner slaps her, as the plot demands it, she breaks down in tears. As if she refused with all her being, because she became another, everything she accepted before…
Gena Rowlands in “Opening Night”, by John Cassavetes (1977).
Photo Faces Distributing Corp.
Opening night is less of a film about aging – as many have written, and they wrote it because Cassavetes said so! – than on a birth. Of a woman and an actress. It is this metamorphosis – painful, dangerous, furious – that Cassavetes captures in a sort of mental odyssey, encumbered with these verbal and visual digressions that he adores and which explain him. If the last twenty minutes sacrifice to a fake happy ending falsely liberating, the style of the dialogues always evokes the elegance and sado-masochism of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (whom Cassavetes greatly admired). Hence this reply that one of his ex throws at the heroin: “In my eyes, you are no longer a woman. You are a professional. You don’t care about anything. Personal relationships, love, sex, affection… I only have a small role in the play, not very sympathetic. People don’t like me. I can’t afford to love you…”
“After the rehearsal”, by Ingmar Bergman (1984)
While Henrik (Erland Josephson) rested – a little nap after rehearsal, that’s his age! –, Anna (Lena Olin), the young interpreter of Dream from Strinberg, disembarked, her head full of questions. And anxieties. No longer a stubborn hatred for her mother, an actress like her, better than her, no doubt, dead but omnipresent. And here is precisely the image of this Rakel (Ingrid Thulin), with these intoxications, these invectives and these lassitudes that Henrik has never forgotten…
![Photo personal movie Lena Olin and Erland Josephson in “After the Rehearsal” (1984), by Ingmar Bergman.](https://focus.telerama.fr/2022/03/17/0/0/4498/3071/0/0/60/0/8701972_982396131-apres-la-repetition-1984-05.jpg)
Lena Olin and Erland Josephson in “After the Rehearsal” (1984), by Ingmar Bergman.
Photo personal movie
With Bergman, the torments are the same, whether one experiences them or simulates them. Theater and life are constantly intertwined: a sort of Schengen area, where everyone can circulate freely and freely. That doesn’t make things any easier: cohabitation sometimes turns out to be daunting. But Bergman is convinced: “The dead are not dead and the living all look like ghosts”…
“The Ogres”, by Léa Fehner (2014)
For Léa Fehner, the theater is a big top. The backstage surrounds the stage and extends into space, all around. And so, from city to city, about twenty actors – “ogres” who swallow the road, the joys and the sorrows pell-mell – offer their audience a show made up of songs and dances from two plays by Chekhov : the bear and The Wedding…
![Photo bus films “The Ogres”, by Léa Fehner (2016).](https://focus.telerama.fr/2022/03/17/0/0/4711/2351/0/0/60/0/498ed03_658601874-ogres-2016-01.jpg)
“The Ogres”, by Léa Fehner (2016).
Photo bus films
It is a thundering film, where the actors play several roles, experience several destinies. Their anxieties, their anger, their resentments swell, explode, then evaporate, giving way to the only feeling that human beings provoke, according to Chekhov and Léa Fehner at least: indulgence…
« Guermantes», by Christophe Honoré (2021)
They were to play, Salle Richelieu, in Paris, an adaptation ofIn Search of Lost Time. But the Covid-19 has been there. Performances cancelled. But rehearsals resumed, some time later, in a new place, in another theater. Are we going to play? Or not ? And when ?…
![Photo Jean-Louis Fernandez / Les Films Pelléas - La Comédie-Française - Ego Productions / Groupe Mediawan “Guermantes”, by Christophe Honoré (2021).](https://focus.telerama.fr/2022/03/17/0/0/6250/4167/0/0/60/0/07c7f42_704317100-guermantes-2021-05.jpg)
“Guermantes”, by Christophe Honoré (2021).
Photo Jean-Louis Fernandez / Les Films Pelléas – La Comédie-Française – Ego Productions / Groupe Mediawan
It is this suspended time that Christophe Honoré captures: what do actors (those of the Comédie-Française, in this case) do when they are not acting? Well, they are playing! Even that they play it a little: lunches are improvised, intrigues are tied, of which they do not know themselves if they invent them or undergo them. Gone to be a documentary, Guermantes gradually turns into a reflection, light, evanescent, on illusion. Like in this film by Jean Renoir (The Golden Carriage) where Anna Magnani wondered – as we all did, sometimes – if her life was becoming a dream.
“Gunshots on Broadway”, by Woody Allen (1994)
In 1920s Broadway, backstage is no good to young playwright David Shayne (John Cusack). His play is produced by a gangster who imposes his girlfriend – no one – (Jennifer Tilly) on him as a co-star. The insufferable alcoholic star (Dianne Wiest), with whom he has an affair, keeps ordering him “Don’t talk, don’t talk” every time he talks to her, which obviously gets on his nerves. And then there’s Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), the boss’ girlfriend’s bodyguard. With dismay, David realizes that the advice of this thick brute considered a piece that he believed, in his vanity, worthy of Chekhov and Strinberg…
![Photo Miramax / Magnolia / Sweetland “Gunshots on Broadway”, by Woody Allen (1994).](https://focus.telerama.fr/2022/03/17/0/0/4108/2671/0/0/60/0/6e1a4cb_676770416-coups-de-feu-sur-broadway-1994-04.jpg)
“Gunshots on Broadway”, by Woody Allen (1994).
Photo Miramax / Magnolia / Sweetland
Oh, talent! All of Woody Allen’s work is an amused reflection on those who believe they have it. And on those who – like him! – are convinced of the contrary. Cheech, he will go to murder and death to protect his. A monster or a martyr of art?
To have
Yes Partners, by Claude D’Anna (1984). 1 DVD Doriane Films.