REVIEW - MARIUS

The environmental limitations of the stage can force playwrights, or encourage them, to enliven their works with busy, complex plots and snappy dialogue. The audience accepts the theatricality of it, since that's what makes it involving. On film, only the least discerning (or most theatrical) of audiences will accept such theatricality, which is why Daniel Auteuil's adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's play Marius, Auteuil's second film as director, second Pagnol adaptation as director, and first of three in his adaptations of Pagnol's trilogy, is such a sloppy mess on screen. Auteuil's direction is all wrong - its stage-set origins are less apparent in the lack of variety of location than in the stuffy, sit-com staging, as the camera has a habit of pointing itself in one direction and not budging. And the actors are too demonstrative in their motions, and too quick to respond; the air of extensive rehearsals hangs heavy over an already stuffy enterprise. An overly clear sound mix only contributes further to the film's dearth of naturalistic features. The plot is one of those wormy ones where very little happens, but very much is planned - it's somehow so hard to keep up with a plot in which so little changes from opening credits to end credits. Its dramatic meat is found in discussions, generally overplayed, over-explicit and overlong, and frustratingly just bringing us, if not full circle, then at least most of the way. It's a will-they-won't-they type thing, wherein everyone acts as if they've been blinkered and earplugged to events which occur both out of and in their presence, at the loudest conceivable pitch. With so much WRITING going on, it is thankfully inevitable that some of it, albeit not a lot, will hit its mark; it's films like this that can give French comedy a bad reputation, but it's at least sporadically amusing.