If you have a certain frame of mind (which I have, and share with my friend William Breiding), you will naturally be drawn to the remarkable 1913 novel by Alain-Fournier [Henri Alban-Fournier, 1886–1914]. Le Grand Meaulnes is justly considered a masterpiece of French literature, and it captures the subtle tension between dream and reality, and between desire and fulfillment. The main character, Augustin Meaulnes, a seventeen-year-old student, gets lost and encounters a woman he falls in love with, then can’t find her, an event that determines the subsequent story. But the tale is told from the point of view of his fifteen-year-old friend François Seurel, and it’s this technique that makes the story brilliant, because the real point of the story is what it all means to Seurel. It’s an elegant, precisely written tale, and the author’s obvious genius was almost immediately extinguished on the battlefields of World War I.
The novel was successfully filmed in 1967 by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, but I haven’t seen that version. This 2006 version, directed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, begins well, but gets bogged down half-way through, and incomprehensibly changes the ending. Meaulnes is played by Nicolas Duvauchelle, a good actor who is miscast in this role. He makes Meaulnes seem surly and selfish, and his Hugo-Boss model looks are wrong for this. Jean-Baptiste Maunier plays Seurel. He’s the angelic-looking lad who sang the soprano part of Saint-Preux’s Concerto Pour Deux Voix and appeared in Les Choristes. He does a reasonably good job, but the attempt to age him at the end of the movie by giving him a mustache looks ridiculous. But by then, the movie has drifted into limbo, anyway. Clémence Poésy looks and sounds too mature for her part.
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