European Films

Le promeneur du Champ de Mars is one of those films that is ostensibly about a singular subject (in this case the last months of the French President Mitterand, who died in 1996), but in reality is about many things all at once: politics, socialism, history, disease, memories and eternity. Robert Guédiguian directs the film from a screenplay by Gilles Taurand and Georges-Marc Benamou, the latter also the author of the book Le dernier Mitterand (The Last Mitterand, also the film's English title) on which the script is based.

 

Le promeneur... in fact tells the story of the creation of that book, as we follow a writer named Antoine Moreau (Jalil Lespert) who gets to know the French president during the last months of his 14 year-reign because he has been asked to write his autobiography. Of course, Mr Moreau is a thinly veiled version of Mr Benamou himself; just like the script sees Mr Mitterand as a character who resembles the late President an awful lot but who, at the same time, is not him completely. Surely, the wonderful performance of Michel Bouquet as Mitterand is a study of the mannerisms and speech of the  late statesman that is morbidly eerie to watch, but this film is not so much an old-fashioned all-encompassing biography as it is a modern film interested in some of the ideas that Mitterand seemed to represent for the French people or at least the French socialist left. The screenwriters and the director have used these two characters, one historical and one fictive, to explore these ideas.

 

In the 1990s, Mitterand was in his second 7-year term as the President of the Republic, but he had been active in French politics since the German occupation during WWII. He rose steadily through the French political ranks, first as a friend of Charles De Gaulle, later as the leader of the socialist opposition. After two earlier failed bids, he was elected the first French socialist President in 1981. The French left, as personified by the writer Antoine in the film, could not help but be in awe of his decades-spanning career, even though some people of the left had more conflicted feelings about Mitterand, who participated in pro-fascist rallies in the 1930s and whose role in the Vichy government during the Nazi-occupation is still hotly debated today. The film gives us Mitterand as an old man looking back on his life, dictating his memoirs not so much as a narrative of "what has been," but rather "how Mitterand remembers it". The president was a very articulate speaker and writer, and the script does him justice, giving him wonderful lines about subjects ranging from resistance during the war to Julia Roberts’ legs. The conversations between Mitterand and Antoine are not so much a dialogue as they are a monologue, despite Antoine’s attempts to get to the bottom of several unclear passages in the history of Mitterand.

 

The scenes in which we follow Antoine’s life outside of his job, his visits to other Frenchmen who knew Mitterand and his socialist friends and family really serve to make it clear to the audience that we are dealing with two very distinct characters: one a young and somewhat reckless writer who has to deal with an enormous amount of day-to-day problems but whose political interest is steadfast and mostly ideological and the other a stately man who knows he has left his imprint on a people, a nation and history itself whilst navigating the enormous gap between ideology and practice for decades. At heart a socialist, one of the working class, Mitterand intimately knows French literature, politics and fine dining like few of his compatriots do. With one of the biggest salaries in the country, not to mention some of the finest houses and one of the largest armies of personnel to attend to his every wish, can one still be called a real socialist?

 

Le promeneur du Champ de Mars is a film about ideas, about the contrasts that leading a nation’s politics and public life create for a man and about the importance of history and memories and how these are interconnected. Though of course it is clear that even the filmmakers have a sense of admiration and awe for their subject, they nevertheless succeed, through Antoine and through their characterisation of the President, to touch upon the universal values that underlie a position of such power and ambivalence. The script, editing and Guédiguian's sure hand in directing are so strong that the all these ideas (and a great many others) seem to spring naturally from the conversations between the two protagonists. It looks and feels so effortless and yet is so cunningly constructed that it could have been a speech written by Mitterand himself.

 

When walking across the Champ de Mars in Paris, in the first days after having stepped down as President, he wonders if everybody has already forgotten him, since no-one seems to recognise him. He has not even finished his sentence or a young girl walks up to him to thank him for "everything" he has done for the nation. “This is the happiest day in my life!” she exclaims. Mitterand seems happy too. Clearly he is not just another passer-by on the Champ de Mars. When the girl has left, he says "I have refrained from asking the girl what ‘everything’ entails exactly,” whilst he quietly suppresses a smile. “That would have been too embarrassing a question for such a young lady.”

 

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