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| Queen Margot |
Bodies at Work
Patrice Chéreau’s cinema of the physical
By David Ehrenstein
Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective of Chéreau's work, Patrice Chéreau: The Love That Dares, runs from February 28-March 5, 2014
Nothing if not protean, Patrice Chéreau’s four-decades-plus career has encompassed opera and theater as well as film. His works in different media are not merely complementary but inextricably intertwined. The demands Chéreau makes on spectators are high—not because his films are “difficult” or “obscure” in the usual sense, but because they are infused with an emotional force unprecedented in its physical intensity—so much so that the viewer is sometimes left exhausted.
Queen Margot
Luchino Visconti comes to mind as an obvious predecessor to this 64-year-old director’s multiform auteur profile, except that Visconti didn’t link the three mediums quite so decisively. Nor did he appear on screen as Chéreau has, having acted in Andrzej Wajda’sDanton, Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte, Claude Berri’s Lucie Aubrac, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, among others. While this may make him sound like France’s answer to Sydney Pollack, Chéreau took these roles mainly for the experience and considers himself not as a workaday actor but as a physical object at the disposal of other filmmakers.
