Indochine. - movie reviews

National Review, March 29, 1993 by John Simon

Why the perennial obsession with updating stories? Why turn the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus into a prize-winning Irish wolfhound at yesterday's dog show? It is much easier for a true artist to transport us to his time than for us, his less gifted interpreters, to drag him to a time and place he did not envisage. The true story of Martin Guerre perfectly fitted, and discomfited, medieval France, and needed only the scrupulous retelling it got in Daniel Vigne's Le Retour de Martin Guerre.

Martin, a young boy in Artigat, at the foot of the Pyrenees, was married off to the even younger Bertrande, two greedy peasant families thus pooling their lands and wanting prompt progeny to cultivate them. For seven years, though, Martin would not cohabit with his wife; finally he did, then bolted and vanished. Eight years later a man came back claiming to be Guerre; although some things, such as his shoe size, were wrong, he knew everything about the villagers, his family, his wife. He won them over in that order, and spent three happy years begetting children and increasing the property. Then an uncle sued him, with Bertrande as co-plaintiff. Two trials ensued, and Martin nearly won - until the real Martin showed up. There was a confession, a public apology, and a hanging right outside the conjugal habitation.

All great impostures fascinate, but this one even more so because of the ambiguous position of the wife. Can a spouse be thus hoodwinked? Or was it collusion? But then why, after three years of connubial bliss, would she reverse herself? And how could the false Martin have learned all about the villagers, even Bertrande's most closely guarded secrets? Yet all this can be made believable in its medieval setting, and in the shadow of the gallows. Transpose it to post-Civil War America as Sommersby, with Jack Sommersby, the brutish Kentucky landowner returning after eight years of war and captivity, and a lot of things no longer make a modicum of sense.

There were photographs by then, and written records and handwriting analysis, and the hangman's noose was no longer quite so Damoclean. To justify the broad outlines of the old story, complicated and confusing additions had to be introduced, notably an irrelevant murder. And can we believe a black judge in a Southern court at the very beginning of Reconstruction? Or that the new, mild, and loving Jack Sommersby would convert the valley from wheat to tobacco, and give former black slaves the same property rights as the white farmers? Or that neither Jack nor anyone else would know how to deal with the pests attacking the tobacco crop - except for the very obstinate suitor of Laurel Sommersby, formerly presumed to be a widow? And much more that's incredible in Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan's script, which besides straining credulity deflects attention from the central drama.

Deflecting, too, is the performance of Richard Gere, who comes across as a most anachronistic Jack. The actor has a certain contemporary cuteness or swagger or snottiness; he seems to know exactly where the camera is, how to present his most flattering angle to it, and how to throw away lines with consummately laid-back nonchalance. Something about this man is fishy; not because he isn't Jack Sommersby, but because he is Richard Gere. He may kill his little boy's dog (because the dog has sniffed out the truth), but he buys the child an even better puppy, and is himself as playful, whimsical, and adorable as any pup. Or it may be simply Gere's eyes: those small, shifty orbs, ever ready, if the sailing gets rough, to jump ship.

Jodie Foster, conversely, is a totally credible Laurel. Disarmingly straight-forward, she seems to summon up every response by the shortest route from the core of her being - no detours, no deviations anywhere. Finally, though, the screenplay lets her down; it is too contrived, too shoddy to contain her excellence, and ends up dragging everything else down, too, including Jon Amiel's amiable direction. Only the camera of Philippe Rousselot keeps shooting the various Virginia locations with cool loveliness, and the indoor scenes with a cozy Rembrandtesque burnish, so that you believe everything you see, except the plot.

* Love Field is such a patently cooked-up piece of goods that it need not detain us long. It concerns Lurene Hallett (Michelle Pfeiffer), a housewife from a Southern marital hell, who, to escape the callous reality of her husband, fantasizes about being gorgeous Jackie Kennedy, madly in love with scrumptious JFK. Although she clings to her platinum-blond hair, in every other way Lurene makes herself into a Jacqueline clone.

On November 22, 1963, Lurene drives to Dallas to catch a glimpse of Jackie and JFK arriving at the airport, named (to delight any film and double-entendre-maker) Love Field. After the assassination, Lurene impetuously decides to bus it up to Washington and the funeral. On the bus, she meets a black man, Paul, en route to Philadelphia with his six-year-old daughter, Jonell. The dazed little girl never speaks, and the father, too, seems to have some sort of guilty secret. Still, a friendship develops among these three as they travel from the improbable to the preposterous.