Moliere

Laurent Tirard's film exploits a gap in Molière's life. In 1644, aged twenty-two, in debt and pursued by bailiffs, the young actor disappears for a period about which almost nothing is known. The film fills that gap with an entirely invented story. Molière, played by Romain Duris, enters a nobleman's household under a false identity, and the people, relationships and hypocrisies he finds there become the material for the plays he will write years later. Familiar scenes from Tartuffe through to The Bourgeois Gentleman turn up here as real events. Laura Morante plays the woman who inspires him. The method is exactly that of Shakespeare in Love and the film does not pretend otherwise. The idea of a young man who insists on performing tragedy while being genuinely bad at it, and stumbles into comedy by accident, is enjoyable in itself. It opened in Europe in January 2007 and in the United States in July 2007. Who it is for: viewers who like French costume comedy and allusions to theatre history. Who it is not for: anyone seeking biographical accuracy, since the period it depicts is wholly fictional.