LE PARFUM D’YVONNE

LE PARFUM D’YVONNE (Directed by Patrice Leconte. Jean Pierre Marielle, Hippolyte Girardot, Sandra Majani, Richard Bohringer)

Patrice Leconte makes cinematic poetry – movies where time is juggled, plots are minimal and all that matters is the moment. Which is not to say he is a great poet. Monsieur Hire, The Hairdresser’s Husband and Tango were all richly entertaining diversions, but there is something glib about them, over-crafted and superficial. His playful style evokes mood but not much emotion. Yet in a cinematic world of blockbuster body counts, over-stated comedy, deliberately convoluted plotting and in-your-face editing, even minor poetry offers welcome relief.

Le Parfum d’Yvonne is a languorous, idiosyncratic, wryly amusing little meditation on memory and desire. “Lovers are like murderers, they always come back,” observes eccentric old queen, Dr Meinthe (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who presided over the affair between professional idler Rene (Hippolyte Girardot) and lazily detached beauty Yvonne (Sandra Majani). His face bathed in the light of flames, and caught on grainy film stock, Rene reminisces about his summer of love, not necessarily chronologically.

As in Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past, perfume conjures up not just memory but the sensual evocation of the moment, and while nothing much occurs (they go to a party, they enter a peculiar motoring beauty competition, they visit her uncle) Leconte’s luminous photography and assured juxtaposition of images makes each (sweet) nothing add up to something almost tangible. The film renders with melancholic intensity the blooming of desire, the first touch, first kiss, first love-making, first fight. With a studiously gentle eroticism that makes most movie sex look like so much wham-bam-thank-you-mam, Leconte takes us inside the cocoon of love. And, perhaps even more remarkably, he does it without turning to mush.

The flashbacks maintain a cool perspective, and Leconte has a goldmine of amusement in Marielle’s florid performance as a homosexual using extravagance to disguise his own loneliness. “Melancholia is no laughing matter,” he insists when first introduced, yet this is in itself a wry joke, serving notice of a particularly fragrant blend of sadness and humour. As with most of Leconte’s movies, the need to give it some kind of recognisably dramatic structure leads to a rushed and contrived conclusion, but for the most part Le Parfum d’Yvonne is so evocative of time and place you can almost smell it.