CINEMA: Derek Malcolm
JEAN-PAUL Rappeneau’s bustling Cyrano de Bergerac was thought a considerable risk to make, but turned out to be one of the most successful European films of recent years. That, however, is nothing compared with the risk taken with his latest film, The Horseman on the Roof, probably the most expensive French film ever made.
Will this romantic historical epic, set in Provence in the 1830s and culled from Jean Giono’s 1950s novel, justify its 130 days of shooting, more than 100 sets and almost
1 000 specially made costumes? It seems unlikely. One of the main reasons is that, unlike Cyrano, where you simply have to plough through a busy plot and watch Gerard Depardieu’s star performance, this is a story where nothing much happens. Its two star- crossed lovers never consummate their mutual passion, except perhaps in a massage scene in which one cures the other of the ravages of cholera.
The massager is Olivier Martinez as a young Italian hussar who flees to Provence, where he finds the disease sweeping the countryside and a lynch mob who suspect him of poisoning a well. Hiding in an apparently empty house, he comes across Juliette Binoche’s young married woman who feeds him and then disappears.
He meets her again, only to learn that she is married and searching for her husband, a much older man. The hussar follows her and the pair survive everything fate can throw at them.
The film is gorgeous to look at, a bit like a romanticised and Europeanised western. But it is difficult for Binoche to give her best against an admittedly decorative block of wood who has to suggest dash, gallantry and utter dedication as well as burgeoning love, but can’t really manage more than a fraction of each.