IMPROMPTU
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
IMPROMPTU is a film staring Judy Davis. It is itself an impromptu on the beginning of the famous liaison of George Sand, the French novelist, and Frederick Chopin, the Polish composer and pianist. If you find those attributions necessary, you may not feel drawn initially to IMPROMPTU because you have not been infected yet with these fascinating personalities and artists. If you find the attributions irritating and inadequate, you are the primary audience for this film. However, I urge people of the first category to see IMPROMPTU, too; it is a wonderful film, funny, alive, visually and musically rich, driven by complex performances by some really wonderful actors.
George Sand is played by Judy Davis, an actor I am not familiar with, but one I want to see again soon. Sand was a woman who achieved notoriety in her day by adopting a male nom de plume, wearing men's clothes, smoking cigars, being a sportswoman, conducting her love affairs openly, and being her own person; she was a kind of one-woman cause celebre in 1830s and 1840s. In IMPROMPTU Sand invites herself to a country house party to meet and seduce Chopin, for whom she has developed an obsession on the strength of his music. The socially ambitious duchess has invited him, his great friend Franz Liszt (played by Julian Sands), Liszt's lover (Bernadette Peters), Eugene Delacroix, the painter, and Edward de Muset, the poet and Sands' great (but now former) love, invited them for a fortnight in the country.
I believe this wonderful set-up is the invention of the screen writer. (You will note the lack of many names in this notice--my source material was destroyed before I could write this and I have a Emmenthalerisch memory (full of holes).) The house party is hilariously disastrous, Sand's wild children contributing not a little to the final catastrophe.
Back in Paris, Sand continues her pursuit of Chopin, who is depicted here as prim to the point of prissiness. Meanwhile another claimant has entered the lists for the reluctant Pole. And Sand is having problems with a past that continues to make claims on her, ludicrously and ridiculously. Through all this bedroom-farcical comedy runs a serious and tender love story that is finding itself as the movie unfolds.
And through it all, Davis is preposterous, impossible, tender, desperate, strong, weak, cunning, naive, awkward, and graceful, full of guile and honesty, till she near to breaks your heart with a performance that nearly turns IMPROMPTU into a one-woman show.
Fortunately, for the viewer who believes that two great performances are better than one, Peters is more than up to the challenge of holding her own on screen. For once, Peters gets a chance to *act* and in a major part. Her character, a titled lady who left her husband to be Liszt's muse (and winds up being the mother of his enormous flock of infants, whose crying he escapes by his continuous touring and concertizing), is turned from being a light, sophisticated Parisienne into a shrew and harpy by the unhappiness and unfairness of her life as a "conventional" mistress and upper-class bohemian, her life as a woman who has children, stays home, and whose role is to "inspire" her man to greatness. In the end, it ruins her, but allows Peters to register the most mature performance that I have ever seen from her.
But then this is a great ensemble cast with wonderful, memorable performances from every single member. The cast is mostly English and the Frenchness of the script is perhaps a little thin. The country nobleman who unwillingly hosts his wife's artists is an English squire of the old school, interested in hunting, not art; perhaps such types are also French. I don't know. But this is a very English film, IMHO, for all the French locales and names. The squire-type even says "Bon appetit" with an English accent. I was also slightly distracted by the resemblance between the handsome young man who plays Chopin and the Chekhov-character from the original Star Trek days, the smile, the physical business, the East Slavic accent, quite striking, actually; fortunately this Chopin is a better actor by far than the scene-chewing, "wodka" drinking Mr. Chekhov.
These minuscule cavils aside, I cheerfully recommend IMPROMPTU to you. It is a first-rate movie rich in performances.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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