Moliere

Comedy

Fabrice Luchini	M. Jourdain
Laura Morante	Elmire Jourdain
Ludivine Sagnier	Célimène
Jean-Claude Jay
Edouard Baer	Dorante
Romain Duris	Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
Fanny Valette	Henriette Jourdain
Gonzague Montuel	Valère
Gilian Petrovski	Thomas
Sophie-Charlotte Husson	Madeleine Béjart
Anne Suarez	Catherine de Brie
Annelise Hesme	Marquise du Parc
Luc Tremblais	Gros-René
Nicolas Vaude	Monsieur
Philippe Du Janerand	Bonnefoy
Isabelle Caubère	Toinette
Mélanie Dos Santos	Louison - 8 ans
Pierre Laplace	Cyrano
Wilfred Benaïche	Jean Poquelin
François Civil	Louis Béjart - 14 ans
Jean-Michel Lahmi	Pinel

Director	Laurent Tirard
Producer	Christine De Jekel; Olivier Delbosc; Marc Missonnier
Writer	Laurent Tirard; Grégoire Vigneron; Gregoire Vigneron

If most comedians secretly want to be tragedians, the famous, 17th century French actor-playwright Moliere was no exception, as is comically obvious in Moliere. Somewhat like Shakespeare In Love, Moliere is a work of fiction linking several of the bard's most famous works with an imagined, personal experience leading to the writer's inspiration. When we first meet Jean-Baptiste Poquelin--a.k.a. Moliere--he has been asked by the French king to perform something new as a show of gratitude for being given a theater. Moliere, best known for his comedies The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, is anxious to write a drama, but his royal fans (and, for that matter, everyone else) won't hear of such a thing. Approached by a young woman who asks him to visit her dying mother, Moliere encounters an important woman from his past. From there, the story goes back in time many years prior: Moliere is rescued from debtor's prison by the wealthy Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), who disguises the then-budding playwright as "Tartuffe," a tutor for his daughter. Jourdain provides his guest with room and board, for which Jourdain expects Moliere to teach him to perform the aristocrat's own one-act play, written to impress a comely young widow (Ludivine Sagnier) the married Jourdaine hopes to seduce. While Jourdain, a self-improvement dilettante, fritters away his time, Moliere falls for the man's neglected wife, Elmire (Laura Morante), a situation that clearly contains the seeds of Moliere's future hit Tartuffe. Co-written and directed by Laurent Tirard, Moliere is one of those films about an artist that encourages a viewer familiar with its subject to connect the dots between story details and the artist's real-world legacy. It's a lot of fun, not to be taken too seriously, though the film's real theme is that a writer's voice is only authentic when it utilizes the writer's natural gifts, and that comedy is really just another perspective on tragedy. --Tom Keogh