Occasionally the biopic of a great artist can aspire to art itself
(Love is the Devil is a recent example), but more often than not the genre reduces its subject matter to little more than caricature, a
joining up of dots of the known facts and a painting in by numbers
(think Hilary and Jackie or Total Eclipse). Sadly, Vigo: Passion for Life tends towards the latter.
Having tried his hand at musicals, British director Julien Temple now
attempts a film "inspired by" the life of influential French filmmaker
Jean Vigo and based on the stage play Love's a Revolution by Chris Ward. It's a story ripe for interpretation: son of infamous French anarchist Almereyda, Vigo was a dirctor whose handful of controversial works shocked contemporary society and have inspired directors from Francois Truffaut to Marc Caro (Delicatessan) since. Using the relationship between Vigo (James Frain, fresh from his turn as Daniel Barenboim in the aforementioned biopic of Jacqueline du Pre) and his wife Lydu (Romane Bohringer) as its axis, Temple's film charts the short career
of one of cinema's earliest visionaries before his death from
septicemia at the age of 29.
While Frain and Bohringer both deliver fine performances in
themselves, their accents are an aural incongruity: Bohringer's fiery
French coquette sits uncomfortably with Frain's middle-class English.
Throw in their French pal Bonaventure (Jim Carter)'s brusque Mancunian
and the cumulative effect is not only perplexing, but distracting.
This problem is not helped by dialogue which at times, verges on the
self-conscious. Lydu you can forgive, because she's not speaking in
her mother tongue - except then you remember that actually she's the
only French cast member playing a French role, but is required to
speak English to do it.
None of this would matter of course if the film transcended these
fundamental problems, but unfortunately it does not. Vigo: Passion for Life is eclipsed by the few short sequences shown from Vigo's original films: ten seconds of Zero de Conduite or L'Atalante are more memorable than all 103 minutes of this worthy, but flawed, attempt. Despite its faults however, if Vigo the film brings Vigo the director to a wider audience, its efforts will not have been wasted.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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