Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152916 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-01-14
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 122 minutes

Customer Reviews

Superior much copied original
The story is bound to be familiar since Hollywood's remake Sommersby attempted to re-interpret an interesting theme with dissapointingly mediocre results. Vigne's undoubtedly superior original, has Martin Guerre (Depardieu) as a man returning to his village who as a youngster abandoned his wife (Bayc). He is soon though accused of being an impostor... The medieval tale of mysterious twists and turns about the man's identity has two major strengths: firstly, Depardieu's tranquil performance which makes an interesting counterpart to his great physical presence, and secondly, the accurate depiction of the chaotic world of the Middle Ages governed by cruelty and superstition, ignorance and mistrust. The end result is quilt successful, and despite some flaws in the building of the story, it provides suspense and beautifully sustained perfommccs from beginning to end.

Important theme, and it also looks and sounds good
Judged as a mediaeval costume drama cum adventure film, Le Retour de Martin Guerre succeeds admirably. The story - man disappears for donkey's years, is believed dead, then pops up out of the blue and resumes his place only to be accused of being an imposter - is of universal interest. The script moves things along at a trot and finds a neat balance between the jarring pitfalls of anachronism and Tolkienesque whimsy. The SW France location filming in Ariege, then and now one of France's poorest corners, and Haute Garonne, while providing the authentic look of the 16th century village and the echoing halls of the Palais de Justice in Toulouse, never goes over the top into some kind of Much-Wallowing-in-the-Marsh. The direction places the courtroom scenes at the heart of the matter, but they don't dominate the film to the extent that all preceding them is a mere hors d'oeuvre.

Gerard Depardieu gives a strong, intense performance. In court he expresses eloquently to the viewer the numerous emotional conflicts his character is going through, while suggesting that these are not revealed to the judges, witnesses and spectators. Mathilde Baye is excellent, too. Her look is perfect - the very image of the mediaeval woman, the virgin Mary or one of her handmaidens or saints in a thousand religious paintings of the era.

But the merit of the film lies in considerably more than its looking and sounding good. Its timeless theme, a meditation upon the nature of identity, is what raises its interest beyond the immediate and made it remain with me afterwards. Guerre mk 2 is a better man than the mk 1 version both in how he treats his wife and in his work. The old chestnut `if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck then the odds are that it is a duck' is tested to the limit. Hence the ultimate predicament of Guerre's wife evokes in the viewer enormous sympathy that informs the poignant conclusion.

Documentary Made Costume Drama
First of all, let's give this film its proper name. The original book may have been American, but the title of the shooting script, and the working name, was "Le Retour de Martin Guerre" - a film in French by Daniel Vigne. It's not asking too much to ask French, especially from a film with a first-line French cast.

The source is really real-life and contemporary - there are still accounts by the Inquisitor Coras in his limping early Renaissance style - but let's go with the flow and take it no further back than Natalie Zemon Davis' historical study, probably the first feminist book within the Annales group. As a narrative, Davis' book is very flat; her question is one of the psychohistory of the common people: if Bertrande de Rols really was able to distinguish between the Martin Guerre she married and the impostor Arnaud du Tilh, why did she not tell? Why would a chaste young Catholic matron let an impostor share her bed for so long and beget a child on her? Why would a whole group of retainers willingly connive at the stealing of their master's property - and identity - from him? How did Arnaud learn every detail of the Guerre family in detail, down to Bertrande's responses during the sexual act? Davis probes, and theorizes, and comes up with exactly nothing. She looks at collusion, the only possible motive (Martin Guerre must have been a hideously bad husband, father and master, and Arnaud seemed such a preferable choice), and comes up with - exactly nothing. We're none the wiser at the end than we are at the beginning.

Aparently Davis was a "technical adviser" for Vigne's film. I'm glad she was no more than that. Vigne, again, posits no answers; but collusion between Arnaud and the whole family is never touched upon (we're not even told that Arnaud's family came from right near Artigat - which Vigne considerately places near Toulouse to have a nice venue for the trial), and he introduces a coincidence factor - Martin limps in, one-legged and looking like a mangy Albrecht Durer from the Prado self-portrait, at the very moment the trial is going on. Coras is thus able to ask directly of Bertrande whether Martin or Arnaud is the real Martin, and she chooses Arnaud without hesitation. For all her wealth, this is a peasant girl. What hidden sophistication lies undiscovered here?

Okay, folks. "Le Retour de Martin Guerre" is not a documentary. It's a fantastical story, and a whacking good one at that. It should have been left to end as Vigne himself had originally intended - NOT with all minds being changed and Arnaud suspended from a gibbet while Bertrande, Sanxi, and the now-bastard daughter of Bertrande and Arnaud resume a life of domestic felicity with Martin. Arnaud can't have been just a gold-digger; he was a loving husband to Bertrande, more than father to Sanxi, a generous and indulgent master to all, even the villainous uncle Pierre. The only possible answer is that - it has no meaning. All is as Vigne makes it, no more.

To start with, there's the setting - the sort of thing the French do so well. It's a wonderful, idyllic portrait of the rural Midi, with bits of mediaeval Toulouse thrown in to vary it, costumes utterly authentic in such a way as to provide an amazing play of everything from linens to silks (for the family Guerre were RICH peasants - money had nothing to do with God-determined social class), music newly composed but just as it would have been in early Renaissance Provence, and modern but not anachronistic dialogue.

Characters - only three merit mention, but all in such a way that makes us think and appreciate. Gérard Depardieu is normally a gorilla, a GORILLA, but here it fits: Arnaud du Tilh, whatever his virtues, is an unreconstructed peasant roughneck striving to fit in - and fitting in perfectly - with the Guerre milieu. (Davis does imply that Martin was an odd choice for Bertrande. Was it his ambiguous sexuality - or could Arnaud have been the real Martin, and Bertrande thus marrying beneath her?) As I say, a loving husband, a tender father - nobody except uncle Pierre, the serpent in this Paradise, could object to Arnaud du Tilh as a Guerre. The second actor worth singling out is Roger Planchon; Coras was probably a country magistrate with more money than brains, as his documentary leavings seem to indicate, but Planchon makes Coras into the abstract figure of Justice, a learned man whom no-one would scorn or disobey. I leave the Bertrande for last; we all know the great, beautiful eyes of Nathalie Baye and how they can enchant us, we glory in her acting, we're helpless before her remarkable beauty. I'd add two things for this film: how splendid she looks in the austere garments of a young and well-off peasant wife, and her total marital submission to ... the "impostor" Arnaud du Tilh. She makes Bertrande's point beautifully - a husband is someone who IS one, not someone who is CALLED one.

The film is a wonder - taken on its own terms, Vigne's terms. Let the history be forgotten, let Coras' documents moulder. "Le Retour de Martin Guerre" takes its place as the documentary of early Renaissance Provence, even though Vigne has made it more drama than documentary. If you missed it, there's still time to make up the deficiency.