Rendez-Vous 2006

The annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema has kicked off to an incredibly promising start with the screening, among others, of Danièle Thompson’s Orchestra Seats. Aside from the sharp, just-on script that pulls in the three stories of a pianist, an actress, and an art collector into the intimate world of a server at the local bar, Jessica (Cécile de France), who has just arrived from Mâcon to Paris in search of a job, the film—despite its moments of comic relief and romance—offers meditative moments on the practice of art, its production, and its presentation.
The stories within Orchestra Seats can be parsed in multiple ways, transversely as stories of disenchantment and renewal, fractally as tales of different kinds of love—filial, romantic, artistic, and directly, without any mediation, as critical turning points in the professional trajectories of its protagonists. The principal players the pianist Lefort (Albert Dupontel),Versen (Valérie Lemercier) the soap opera actress, and old man Grumberg (Claude Brasseur) the collector are all at some kind of crisis point in their lives. Lefort’s existence as an acclaimed pianist has become entirely claustrophobic. In a beautiful dreamy scene we see him playing to a group of people in a cancer ward while in an all too real moment in a concert he asks the audience if they’re not all feeling a bit too hot. Versen is a soap opera star with the power to move the masses but dreams of being cast in a film as Simone de Beauvoir by Botinski (Sydney Pollack). Grumberg, in his sunset years, has acquired a young mistress and plans to sell off all the Brancusis, Matisses, Légers etc that he has collected. Enter Jessica the naïve and untouched, wide-eyed girl from Mâcon who has just started at the bar across the street. Directly and not so directly we will see their worlds and their ups and downs not just through their eyes but hers. As Danièle Thompson put it after the screening, she’s the clear light that bounces off the others, that illuminates them.

Lefort’s wife Valentine (Laura Morante) is also his manager. Unstintingly devoted to his career she is unable to come to terms with the precipitating crisis. When Lefort learns that Grumberg is auctioning his lifelong collection of art he marvels aloud to his wife. Valentine in turn remarks that Grumberg is not an artist, he is an investor. Then finally, he’s like you, Lefort says. At the moment when Valentine must choose between Lefort the pianist and Lefort the husband where will her loyalties lie? For that matter, is Lefort the stuff-shirt pianist-on-tour different from a possible future Lefort who plays the piano but on his own time and in shirt sleeves? Where do we draw the line between the practice of art and its presentation? Versen who is being offered more and more money per episode of her popular soap is craving to act in another sort of film, and dreams of high art and its directors. Her life is the opposite of Lefort’s. It touches and brings tears to the eyes of Jessica and those like Jessica, ordinary women. When she is considered for a dream role by Botinski, it is Jessica who in a passing moment, delivering a drink, has said of Versen, she can be all women at once. Yes, there is a difference between high art and low art, the popular and the elevated, but there is also art, the thing in itself, and Thompson has managed in this feat of a film, to get closer to the thing in itself.

Danièle Thompson co-wrote the film with her son Christopher who plays old man Grumberg’s son. The story of father and son, their hinted-of-past of mutual recriminations and rapprochements, the two women they have shared, the art collection that has divided them, unfolds with a sort of attention that slowly takes over the film. One cannot help but wonder what it was like for a mother and a son to write this story of a father and a son, the real story of art and of love behind this film.

Orchestra Seats will play at the Walter Reade again today as part of the festival at 1:15pm and then at 9pm.