When Hollywood adapts great literature into a movie, it is best not to expect too much, and merely feel thankful that anything has been salvaged. But the treatment that has befallen Suite Française seems particularly harsh. Those who were captivated by Irène Némirovsky’s nuanced, witty evisceration of French domestic life and morality under German occupation may be horrified to learn that her novel has been prettified into a Cath Kidston floral romance.
What has been done to Suite Française is a crime, a crime which will pass unnoticed among cinemagoers who have not read the novel, because the film is a perfectly pleasant, well-made concoction: a Second World War Mills & Boon with the nasty-but-sometimes-nice Germans looking handsome in their crisp uniforms. At any moment, you expect the jolly French townsfolk, hoarding their Jambon de Bayonne, to burst into a cheery round of Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?
The sentimental, middlebrow desecration of the book has been committed by director Saul Dibbs (The Duchess), aided by writer Matt Charman, and, one suspects, the popularising paws of producer Harvey Weinstein. What makes the situation all the more irritating is that three terrific actors — Kristin Scott Thomas, Michelle Williams and Matthias Schoenaerts — star in the production, and their tense household relations often provide a glimpse of how good this could have been.
Williams is Lucile Angellier, a young wife whose soldier husband Gaston is in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, while she languishes in the family home in the small (fictional) town of Bussy with her mother-in-law Madame Angellier, played by Scott Thomas at her most patrician, bitter, steely — and just a tiny bit bored.
Into this dusty, net-curtained, ornamented world comes the tailored testosterone of Schoenaerts as Bruno, a polite German officer with a taste for classical piano. Mme Angellier sees him as the enemy and wants to “rip his eyes out”, but Lucile takes a softer “we are all human” approach. A couple of tuneful tinkles later, and two minds meet across the barriers of war, as Lucile and Bruno commune in dappled sunlight amid lavender and roses. They are rather charming together in their tentative passion, and Schoenaerts, who played tougher guys in Rust and Bone and Bullhead, is the perfect gentleman here.
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The film is based on the “Dolce” section of the unfinished book, which is set in 1941 as Paris fell to the Germans, and refugees streamed southwards. Némirovsky saw into the darkest — and most heroic — corners of the French soul, documenting the greed and selfishness of the rich on the run with their monogrammed linens and china, but also the sacrifices made by many. In her hands, the Lucile and Bruno story is tragic, compromising and ambiguous, but in the film an irritatingly obvious voiceover from Lucile provides an instant spoiler. The voiceover also deprives Williams of her usual subtlety in conducting relationships, previously seen in Blue Valentine and Take This Waltz.
Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942, but the book was discovered and published by her daughter in 2004. The “Dolce” section — one of a planned five in the suite — was finished, but Dibbs and Charman have added a silly Keystone-Cops style chase to the end.
Still, the sleazy machinations of a provincial town under occupation are worth observing, as neighbours send low gossip about each other in anonymous letters to the Nazi command. The story follows the Angelliers’ farmer tenants, Benoit (Sam Riley) and Madeleine (Ruth Wilson), who find a priapic German brute billeted upon them. Meanwhile the increasingly ubiquitous Margot Robbie appears as Celine, a sexual collaboratrice, and up at the château, the Viscount (Lambert Wilson) and the Viscountess (Harriet Walter) find the occupiers to be less pliable than they hoped. Incidentally, Wilson is French, but the rest are playing their parts in a generic English accent, while ze Nazis spik laik zat.
There is something of Toytown about Bussy: there is no real sense of terror as the occupation tightens its grip, and the townsfolk stand with baskets or washing at the wells, looking ready for a little musical number. And that piano does keep tinkling in the background. When a woman is tortured, we merely see her looking a little bloody as she passes. Even a public execution is Nazi-lite.
I saw Suite Française last year, when it was possibly in the running for the Oscars, but its release was mysteriously delayed. I went back for a second viewing this week, and was disappointed again by the way it had leached the book of its intelligence. If I were the French, I’d get the rights back to Némirovsky’s work, and make a sophisticated movie in my own language. Still, if book sales increase, Weinstein’s efforts here may not have been in vain. Saul Dibbs, 15, 107min