Review: Sarah Bernhardt, La Divine

“For 29 years, I’ve been delivering the vibrations of my soul, the beating of my heart and my tears to audiences. I’ve played 112 roles. I’ve fought like no-body else.” With a historic, artistic figure as immense as the Divine Sarah Bernhardt, an actress who was famous all over the world in her time and whose funeral saw 600,000 people flocking to Paris in 1923, seasoned director Guillaume Nicloux was undoubtedly taking on a high-stakes endeavour when he made The Divine Sarah Bernhardt. It’s also fairly astonishing, on paper, to see such a unique filmmaker embarking on the biopic adventure, a genre mostly taken on by the usual faces. But it seems that the director hasn’t renounced any of his strange and incredibly personal passions. In fact, he’s extracted an impressively audacious film from the screenplay (penned by Nathalie Leuthreau), sometimes on bordering on disconcerting, which Memento Distribution are releasing in French cinemas on 18 December. It’s a work of which we might say, in the words of the protagonist herself, “if we’re not telling the truth, we have to lie with utmost sincerity”, because “truth only exists in the present, so to speak of it is basically lying, don’t you think?”

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This elastic and plastic relationship between truth and lie is naturally the preserve of great theatre actors, such as Sarah Bernhardt (Sandrine Kiberlain), who the film reveals playing agony in La dame aux Camélias on stage at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. “You introduce truth into all of your gestures, and such all-consumingly bitter sobs into your voice, that tears really do roll down your cheeks”, one of her many lovers, Edmond Rostand, enthuses (though there was no shortage of female lovers either, such as Louise, played by Amira Casar), on the occasion of the actress’s consecration in 1896. “A day which was supposed to be happy, but which proved the most dreadful, when I lost the love of my life”, Sarah explained many years later, in 1915, to young Sacha Guitry, from a hospital bed as she recuperated from a leg amputation. Because this indomitable Amazonian, surrounded by her people; this dominant, capricious, free and ambitious character who was wholly dedicated to her art, had also deeply loved her father, the actor Lucien Guitry (Laurent Lafitte), since 1886. And with love comes suffering (“your heart has to bleed for the audience to feel anything”).

Navigating vertiginously between three different time periods (1915, 1896 and 1886), the film paints the portrait of an unusual, feminist and excessive (in terms of her generosity, bravado, sharpness, her relationship with money and glory, and her past and present suffering, etc.) woman, opening an intimate window onto the fine, paroxysmic line between the person and the celebrity. Shot amidst beautiful decors (courtesy of Olivier Radot) but always fully focused on its protagonist, the feature film plays with the language of emotion at a slightly morbid time, when the suffering of the soul and the body is being drawn out by a societal fever (we cross paths with Émile Zola, Sigmund Freud and many others) aggravated by the Dreyfus Affair. In this sense, the film instils a feeling of indisputable quality but also of nefarious oddness, which shouldn’t disappoint the director but which does distance the film from the usual biopic canons, transforming it into a hybrid, artistic and more divisive work, mirroring this giant of the theatre world who believed that: “you shouldn’t spend too much time hating, because it’s very tiring; scorn a lot, forgive often and never forget.”

The Divine Sarah Bernhardt was produced by Les Films du Kiosque in co-production with TF1 Films Production, Fils Prod and Belgian firm Umedia. Memento International are steering international sales.

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