Stakes so low that ‘False’ can’t captivate
“False Confessions” can be admired for its high style and distinct tone, but if you really want to enjoy it, you’ll have to force yourself. The last film of Luc Bondy, a Swiss director who worked in both French and German, this is a modern-dress adaptation of an 18th century play by Marivaux, dealing with love and deception. But something is lost in the journey from stage to screen.
The characters exist as if under glass, as specimens of their disparate conditions rather than as genuine people. The soundtrack, by Bruno Coulais (“Coraline”), is spritely, knowing and a bit distancing, reinforcing the mood that Bondy creates here. It’s a vision of love as an elaborate game, one played out and repeated over the various centuries with little variation.
Louis Garrel is Dorante, a young man of aristocratic birth but without aristocratic means, who is hired into the household of the wealthy Araminte (Isabelle Huppert), as part of an elaborate scheme to marry her. As is often the case in plays of this kind, the pretense of loving is often a prelude to the real thing, which makes the pairing of Garrel and Huppert — who, in terms of age, are separated by 30 years — at the very least unexpected, but even, for a short time, confusing. This is, after all, based on a play dealing in romantic archetypes.
Huppert is, as always, up to the demands of the script, which in this case means a nimble delivery of the comedy. Manon Combes is charming as an excitable and easily gulled ingenue, and Garrel so looks the part of the handsome newcomer that he could just stand there and be pleasing. Instead, he does a nice job of conveying the young man’s inner life, though his performance is best appreciated later, once all the turns of his emotional life are revealed.
Yet even so, this is pretty labored stuff and, despite a short running time of 82 minutes, “False Confessions” overstays its welcome. The essential problem is that artifice for artifice’s sake loses its fascination when divorced from human emotion or grand stakes. Though Marivaux’s style arrives intact, despite the modern dress, a sense of the consequences is lost. It simply is not made to matter to us whether Dorante finds money or love, or whether Araminte chooses the right man.
The best thing we can do is wish them well and hope that they’ll conclude their business with as little fuss as possible. Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle