THE COUNTESS OF BATON ROUGE (1997)
"Creatures attract creators."
2 out of ****
Starring Robin Aubert, Geneviève Brouillette
Written & Directed by André Forcier
Cinematography by André Turpin
Coupling lovers are shot from a cannon. A young man slow dances with his cheek on the scaly bosom of a crocodile woman. Canada's one-and-only cyclops projects cinematic images from his eye. The ghost of the world's most beautiful bearded lady appears in Montreal movie theatres. All these bizarreries, and more besides, are to be found in André Forcier's THE COUNTESS OF BATON ROUGE, but the most remarkable thing about this movie is how boring it all is.
It seems like a can't-miss premise. A young Montreal film director, Rex Prince (Robin Aubert), meets an enchanting bearded lady, Paula Paul de Nerval (Geneviève Brouillette), at a freak show, but she is leaving the next day for Louisiana, where she plans to set up the "Circus of Happiness" and call herself La Comtesse de Bâton Rouge. Hopelessly smitten, Rex follows her south. Love, lust, and tragedy ensue--in that order. One could imagine a bad movie being made from this material, but not a dull one. It sounds like what you'd get if an Angela Carter novel was directed by Fellini, or Southern Gothic crossed with magic realism: grotesque comic exuberance, with a hint of pathos. The possibilities are endless, and yet THE COUNTESS OF BATON ROUGE lost my interest in the first scene, and never regained it.
The problem with the movie is that it is not really about anything I have mentioned above. No, the carnival freaks, Circus of Happiness, etc., serve merely as background for the film's frame narrative, in which Rex, now middle-aged and (navel-gazing alert!) bankrupt of ideas (having just finished his own film of his relationship with La Comtesse), wanders around looking morose and reflecting on the healing power of art, the interplay of art and reality, the failure of his dreams, yadda-yadda-yadda. This rigidly structured frame narrative chokes the life out of the film's more interesting material. There should be a lot of energy and extravagance--this is supposed to be a movie about young love and circus freaks, after all--but what we get is tedious and uninspired, weighed down by its pretentions.
It doesn't help that the relationships in the movie have no depth. There are various love affairs, requited and otherwise, but they exist largely on a symbolic level: they exist so the movie can reflect upon their significance, rather than having any intrinsic merit. I am sure Forcier made the movie in good faith, and cared about his characters, but that care does not show in the finished product. The interactions are perfunctory, and two characters, Nuna and Biz, are totally superfluous.
Making matters worse, Forcier seems determined that every line of dialogue have some sort of philosophic import. This results in a neverending succession of ponderous, portentous statements. Really, there are no characters here, just actors mouthing contrived lines, sometimes laughably bad. To wit: "Are you afraid of love?" "Always. But never when I fall in love." Oh, the irony!
I dunno, maybe it's all supposed to be funny, and I just don't get Quebecois humour--but the lifeless, vaguely bluesy score and the staid camera work hint that all this is indeed to be taken seriously. Various scenes from Rex's own film of his youth (also titled La Comtesse de Bâton Rouge) are shown during THE COUNTESS OF BATON ROUGE, and these quite obviously are played for humour: they are melodramatic, poorly acted, and manifestly the work of someone who takes himself much too seriously. Unfortunately, that describes the rest of the film too.
A Review by David Dalgleish (March 7/1998)
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