Dir: Gillaume Nicloux | Cast: Sandrine Kiberlain, Laurent Lafitte, Amira Casar, Pauline Etienne, Artur Mazet | France, Biopic 108′
For a 21st century English person it’s difficult to appreciate the magnitude of Sarah Bernhardt’s celebrity a hundred years ago.
Bernhardt (1844-1923) was simply the greatest actress that the French stage had ever known. And Sandrine Kiberlain certainly does her justice in this exuberant biopic from Guillaume Nicloux whose focus is her final decades. It certainly captures her spirit, her voracious appetite for sex, and the unique place she held in society, one that gave her the title ‘la divine’, but also ‘un monstre scare’ thanks to Jean Cocteau.
But we learn little here about Bernhardt’s glittering career on the stage, which once gave her twenty seven curtain calls. Yet, according to records, Bernhardt wasn’t just an actress she was a legend, worshipped by all and sundry as a goddess, as perhaps the first real European star of the stage at a time when Ethel Barrymore was being hailed as the ‘First Lady of American theatre’.
La Divine opens in Paris 1896. And Sarah Bernhardt, aged 52, is at the height of her glory. A pioneer of feminism, she is effervescent, larger than life and completely unconventional. In keeping with her fame, she holds sway in a lavish and palatial apartment where her pet animals have free rein amongst the overstocked settees, books and ornaments, in sumptuous sets designed by Olivier Radot. A stream of friends come and go at all the hours of the day and night, and Sarah seems oblivious to anyone but herself, elegantly dressed in a series of frothy white cotton blouses, or elaborate gowns embellished with gold and ornaments like those in a Klimt painting.
A ‘tour de force’ she gushes endlessly with gleeful laughter or histrionic outbursts. When her long term lover Lucien Guitry (a cold-faced Lafitte) threatens to leave her for a younger woman she cannily leaves a neckless in his bed, then ignores his reasoning, begging him not to go in an embarrassing showdown surrounded by ‘le tout Paris’.
Even on her sickbed she is a force to be reckoned with, only mildly tempered by philosophy and experience. But unlike Anglelina Jolie’s Maria Callas you don’t warm to this diva, even when she is forced to have a leg amputated. What comes across, unsurprisingly, is her extreme self-centredness, and arch self-belief.
The film is decent but unmemorable, with nothing special in terms of structure or look. A typical biopic that flits between three episodes: 1915, 1896 and 1886. There are brief mentions of Emile Zola, Sigmund Freud etc but only in the context of Bernhardt herself. Even the massively famous Sasha Guitry pales into insignificance in a wan turn from Arthur Mazet. No one really stands out. And Nicloux and his co-writer Nathalie Leuthreau fail to enlighten us beyond delivering a standard portrait of a ‘typical star personality’. A biopic that fails to reveal the real person behind the persona. @MeredithTaylor
NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE