Uniting history and imagination

NEW YORK -- In some ways, Ridicule director Patrice Leconte is quite at home in the film's 18th-century setting. He certainly marvels at a seemingly unremarkable artifact of 20th-century technology -- my voice-activated tape recorder. Observing how it starts and stops every time he speaks, he cries in English, "Oh! It's un-fucking-believable!"

Otherwise, Leconte, who directed the thriller Monsieur Hire (1989) and the romance The Hairdresser's Husband (1990), takes an irreverent attitude toward Ridicule's setting: the court of Louis XVI at the end of the ancien régime. Despite the ornate verisimilitude of the film's Versailles locales and wigs and costumes, Leconte approached this social satire as if it were one of the contemporary comedies for which he is best known among French filmgoers.

"I did a film as a bad student," he explains (through a translator). "If I had been a good history student and had a real taste for history, I would have been very respectful of the period. I didn't document the 18th century at all. I didn't want to be influenced by literary knowledge. I wanted my influence to be only emotional.

"When I showed the film to several different people in Paris, a journalist came to me and said, `Your film is not bad. But there is something a little wrong. At one point, one of the characters sits against a pink-marble fireplace, and pink marble was introduced to France after Napoleon III. It's a detail I really wanted to mention to you.' So I looked at him with big eyes and said, `You're right. But who cares?' I wish there were more pink-marble fireplaces. Filmmaking is by nature a work of imagination. You can't let yourself become embarrassed by too much historical reconstruction."

It would have been easy for Leconte to underline the parallel between the king's court, where wit is a weapon and humiliation results in a loss of power, and today's court of public opinion, where image also determines politics. "This parallel works," he acknowledges, "but that's not what I was trying to show. I didn't want to do a metaphoric film. I didn't even really care about the echoes. I didn't want to be a moralist. But I can't prevent this kind of interpretation. It's too easy to do a film saying these are the good guys, these are the bad guys. Then you become a prosecutor, not a filmmaker. The aristocrats at the court were probably not very commendable, but I always prevented myself from condemning them. I actually thought they were kind of moving in their lack of conscience."

At least those aristocrats' wit made them entertaining. "People of wit are a disappearing race. Where could you find witty people nowadays? Not on TV. Literature has become very austere. Maybe in theater, but even there, witty people have become rare for one simple reason. Witty people are people who have culture, intelligence, elegance. To have all that together today is very hard."

Between Hairdresser and Ridicule, Leconte made three films that have not been released in America. "I don't know why films are bought or not bought. I just don't get it. I'm kind of sad about it because I think a couple of films I made would have seduced the American public. They are very rough, crazy, wacky films.

"I have a real fondness for comedy, but Monsieur Hire, which is more dramatic, is a film I loved making. You always have many different sides of yourself inside. What I'm planning to do in the future is not going in that direction because I love to do different things. It's a solution I've found -- to never go to sleep."

Does that mean he plans to do more drama?

"Yes, but not right away. I know what my two next movies are going to be. The next one is going to be very different from Ridicule. I'm getting ready to make an action movie with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. Humor will be present. The thing that terrifies me the most would be to take myself seriously. I do my films with passion and enthusiasm. I do them very seriously. But I always have distance, not to take myself too seriously. People who take themselves seriously are so boring."

-- Gary Susman