Books, Arts & Manners: For All Seasons

ANDRE Téchiné has always struck me as a profoundly spurious director, whose films were vapid and vague, pretentious and hollow, their texture threadbare, their craft rudimentary. Last year, his Wild Reeds won the Oscar for best foreign film, and though it was better than usual for him, it was still far from compelling. The year before (1993), he directed and cowrote Ma Saison Préférée, and this strikes me as a major achievement. I do wish, however, that the French title had not been kept, giving the film a chichi, art-house aura. But someone must have been afraid (unfoundedly) of creating a confusion with My Favorite Year.

Anyway, Saison is an ambitious attempt to deal with the interlocking problems of three generations within one family, and one outsider who impinges on them. Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) is in her mid forties, a former great beauty still very handsome, and works, like her husband, Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), as a notary public in Toulouse. Her mother, Bertha (Martha Villalonga), is a zesty but stubborn widow of 76, living in a small country house but apparently no longer able to take care of herself. Emilie moves her in with Bruno and herself and their children. Anne (Chiara Mastroianni, and fine) is a first-year law student, who now has her own place; Lucien, an adopted son (Anthony Prada, and not very good), is raw-boned and surly, and has made it to nothing higher than bouncer in a Toulouse bar.

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John Simon

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ANDRE Téchiné has always struck me as a profoundly spurious director, whose films were vapid and vague, pretentious and hollow, their texture threadbare, their craft rudimentary. Last year, his Wild Reeds won the Oscar for best foreign film, and though it was better than usual for him, it was still far from compelling. The year before (1993), he directed and cowrote Ma Saison Préférée, and this strikes me as a major achievement. I do wish, however, that the French title had not been kept, giving the film a chichi, art-house aura. But someone must have been afraid (unfoundedly) of creating a confusion with My Favorite Year.

Anyway, Saison is an ambitious attempt to deal with the interlocking problems of three generations within one family, and one outsider who impinges on them. Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) is in her mid forties, a former great beauty still very handsome, and works, like her husband, Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), as a notary public in Toulouse. Her mother, Bertha (Martha Villalonga), is a zesty but stubborn widow of 76, living in a small country house but apparently no longer able to take care of herself. Emilie moves her in with Bruno and herself and their children. Anne (Chiara Mastroianni, and fine) is a first-year law student, who now has her own place; Lucien, an adopted son (Anthony Prada, and not very good), is raw-boned and surly, and has made it to nothing higher than bouncer in a Toulouse bar.