Being There

IF YOU HAD to travel from Paris to Marseilles, would you fly or take the train! If the response send you scurrying to Charles De Gaulie Airport. The Return of Martin Guerre is probably not for you. But anyone patient enough to appreciate the subtle pleasures of a train ride through the French countryside featuring glimpses of lush panoramas and cameos of sleepy towns should enjoy this film, whose chief virtue is its sense of place.

The place is 16th century Artigat, a French village so small citizens have not yet invented a word for privacy. The tale begins with the marriage of a painfully adolescent couple. Bertrande and Martin, but Martin's immaturity ensures that their honeymoon is short-lived. Soon, Martin mysteriously disappears only to return, nine years later, as unexpectedly as he had vanished. Back from the wars, a bigger and stronger Martin (Gerald Depardieu) receives an enthusiastic homecoming from his family--especially his wife (Nathalie Baye) who has waited faithfully for his return. Gradually some villagers begin to wonder whether this new, improved Martin is really Martin at all. Which, by the way, isn't giving away the plot, since the bulk of the film, much of it in flashback, centers on determining the true identity of the new, improved Martin.

High suspense it isn't--despite the melodramatic (and usually inappropriate) bursts of background music. You may even find that you don't particularly care if the man sleeping with Bertrande is an impostor or the real McCoy. But what this slowly paced film lacks in top-flight mystery is made up for by its compelling authenticity; in fact, director Daniel Vigne recreates 16th-century village life in painstaking detail. The film spills over with highly convincing silhouettes of village routines--shaking the chaff from the grain in woven baskets, donning animal costumes for a religious festival, and the ubiquitous grape-stomping. Remarkably enough, the village men and women boast wrinkles, bulges and (best of all) noses--Artifat's denizens look as though they were yanked off a Bruegel canvas, not a studio backlot. Enhanced by excellent costuming and set design, these characters present an unusually rich, as well as credible, glimpse into the past. The two leads both turn in strong, though less than stellar, performances.

AND YET THE VERISIMILITUDE goes even beneath the surface; The Return of Martin Guerre paints not only a physical, but also a psychological portrait of peasant life under the ancien regime. And that image is compelling if only for its marked contrast to the lifestyle of modern moviegoers. Even small-town life can not approach the incestuous intimacy of a village in which most of the inhabitants not only are related, but actually live together under one roof. In such close quarters, there are no secrets. When Martin finds that he is impotent, for example, the rest of Artifat finds out too. Perhaps the hallmark of this communal living is the scene in which the wedding guests gather around the nuptial bed, tossing advice and lewd jokes to the newlyweds blushing under the covers. Small wonder Martin rolls over and goes to sleep as soon as they've left the room.

Vigne carefully shows both sides of this close-knit life. He frequently underscores the stability and supportiveness of life in the village: in one particularly touching scene, a women called on to testify about Martin's identity lovingly pulls aside his hair to show a scar from a childhood injury. Such intimacy is wondrous, and somewhat disquieting, to urbanities who often don't know their next-door neighbors.

But more often, this closeness becomes an oppressive theme throughout the film. The insularity of Artifat breeds superstition and a near-total reliance on the Church, as represented in the person of the town curate. This messenger of God offers assorted services, such as whipping the naked Martin and Bertrande to make them fortile. Isolated and illiterate, the villagers blindly accept such prescriptions and live in typical medieval terrors of the hellfires that await them. New ideas are not encouraged; when Martin returns with a newfound literacy, one sage man noted "reading and writing leads to all kinds of mischief." And while Martin is revered for his outlandish stories culled during his travels, he is also rebuked for having deserted the family.

In other words, you're damned if you do and demand if you don't--"deviant" behavior is unacceptable, but leaving the village would be an even more heinous crime. And while Bertrande and her husband are physically threatened by those who suspect Martin is an impostor, it never occurs to the couple to begin again in another town. But that is only a solution in today's mobile, even rootless, society: in 16th-century France, even train travels would have been far too swift.