MOVIE REVIEW : Berri’s ‘Uranus’ Bleak, Brilliantly Cast

When an actor begins to tear up the stage or set, as Gerard Depardieu does repeatedly in “Uranus” (Goldwyn Pavilion), at one point ripping chairs, tables and even gendarmes apart, it’s common for some audiences and critics to recoil, file affidavits of theatrical assault.

And certainly, Depardieu is hamming it up in “Uranus”--supremely. In this bleak, brilliantly cast Claude Berri adaptation of the 1948 Marcel Ayme novel, he’s so much larger than life, he sometimes threatens to stomp out all life around him. Playing Leopold, a bearish cafe man who believes, mistakenly, that he conceals the soul of a poet, Depardieu rages, broods, sonorously laments. He yells out lines from “Andromache,” goes crazy with a trumpet in the town square, blusters spectacularly. An actor hasn’t had this much serious license to tear up the scenery for years.

Depardieu isn’t alone in his flights to the purple. “Uranus” boasts a unique all-star French cast, each emoting to or past the hilt. There’s Philippe Noiret as Watrin, the schoolteacher, who weeps at the beauty of every waking hour because World War II nightmares poison his sleep; Daniel Prevost as the friendly little toady of a communist, who falsely informs on Leopold; Daniele Lebrun as a faithless bourgeois wife; Fabrice Luchini as an obsessed ideologue; and Michel Galabru as an ominously low-key, villainous millionaire.

In the core of the story--a complex fresco of the intrigues that afflict a small post-Liberation French town--a fascist journalist (Gerard Desarthe) seeks refuge in the home of an amiable centrist (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who shares lodgings with the all-accepting teacher (Noiret) and a local communist (Michel Blanc).

This quadruple residency seems wildly implausible; the opportunities for hair-raising tension notably untapped. But perhaps this is dictated more by theater’s logic than life’s, part of a narrative compression that allows Berri in barely 100 minutes to indelibly delineate dozens of characters and a vast web of relationships. There’s a double effect. The movie hums with life, yet there’s probably no more than a minute or two that convince you that this unnamed little town actually exists.

The universality of “Uranus” is what appeals to Berri, even though it was written as a topical melodrama, an attack by Ayme on the postwar French communists and a defense of those, like himself, who urged sympathy for collaborators.

But Berri, who is Jewish and whose father voted communist in 1948, tries for something epic: a parable of hypocrisy. He wants to give us this Byzantine tangle of malice and duplicity in all its unrelieved bleakness, a gray landscape full of tormented souls warring under an apparently blank, indifferent sky. Often he succeeds.

That he’s a little chary of the political Pandora’s box he’s opened is obvious. In the film, the key character of Gaigneux, the communist leader, is altered to become the spokesperson for democratic principles and integrity. And the superb actor Blanc (“M. Hire”) gives him the movie’s subtlest performance.

Overall, “Uranus” is probably better produced than directed. Berri may recognize this. He denies himself a producer’s credit here, even though in the past dozen years, with “Tess,” “Amadeus,” “Prizzi’s Honor” and his own Marcel Pagnol films, he’s emerged as one of the world’s best. Yet, the movie’s direction sometimes lacks the stylistic overview that might let it burst into wonder or higher clarity.

In a world without grace, gods or heroes, the only redemption may lie in the recognition and acceptance of chaos. That’s part of the philosophy that seems to hover over “Uranus” (Times-rated Mature for language, brief sensuality and adult themes), a film able to find heroism only in the efforts of its cast. Still and all, that cast gives us something special: rich, roaring, overripe theatrics. A film of ideas as well as character, philosophy as well as personality, “Uranus” soars when its populace take over. And when wild man Depardieu lurches on screen, it’s a grenade full of melancholy and bad poetry, ready to explode.

‘Uranus’

Philippe Noiret: Watrin

Gerard Depardieu: Leopold

Jean-Pierre Marielle: Archambaud

Michel Blanc: Gaigneux

A Prestige/Miramax Films release of a Renn Production. Director Claude Berri. Executive producer Pierre Grunstein. Screenplay by Berri, Arlette Langmann. Cinematographer Renato Berta. Editor Herve De Luze. Costumes Caroline De Vivaise. Production design Patrick Bordier. Sound Louis Gimel, Dominique Hennequin. With Michel Galabru, Gerard Desarthe, Fabrice Luchini, Daniel Prevost. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (Discreet sensuality, language, mature themes).