Beatrice

Early in the film Beatrice, set in the Middle Ages, the titular heroine is gathering in a bird she has caught in a tree. As she prepares to bring the bird in as a pet, Beatrice’s hair becomes entangled in the bare branches, momentarily trapping her. As we shall see, she is very much a prisoner of her time, her gender, and her place.

Beatrice is the new film from French director Bertrand Tavernier. Tavernier likes to travel far and wide for his subjects; lately he’s examined French-settled Africa in the 1930s (Coup de Torchon), a delicate afternoon in the life of a painter (Sunday in the Country), and an American jazzman in exile (Round Midnight). For Beatrice Tavernier journeys to a desolate fiefdom of the late 14^th century, where the Lord (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) returns to his people after having suffered a defeat at the hands of the English.

He takes out his anguish on his son (Nils Tavernier, the director’s son), who is weak, and on his daughter Beatrice (Julie Delpy), who is pure. The son he humiliates; the daughter he rapes and takes as his incestuous bride. Intriguingly, and this is part of Tavernier’s gift, while Beatrice is the strong spiritual heart of the film, the father is not quite a devil. His hateful violence is part of a continuous act of self-destruction, since it is inevitable that someone will strike back at him sooner or later.

As is apparent, Beatrice is not an ode to the glorious age of chivalry. But, while he strips away legend, Tavernier is not merely a debunker. He indulges in his own kind of mythmaking, and Beatrice becomes a figure of classical proportions, a figure of goodness and light.

It’s the world she inhabits that is hard and dark. Tavernier and cinematographer Bruno de Keyzer create an uncompromisingly ordinary look for the Middle Ages. There are no shiny sunsets glimpsed o’er rolling hills; instead, the film is full of grays and browns and stone surfaces, to increase the sense of cold, earthy existence. As the lord seeks out his extermination, he says, “I don’t dread hell. We already dwell there.”

It may sound unlikely to insist that Tavernier’s bleak vision makes for a nice night at the movies, but Beatrice truly is rich in imagination, and watching it is a fascinating experience. This director finds ways of engaging us in the strangest places, and he doesn’t seem close to exhausting himself yet.

First published in The Herald, May 6, 1988

This is pretty early in Delpy’s career; she was not yet twenty. Donnadieu played the creepy kidnapper in the original version of The Vanishing. I interviewed Tavernier once and he lived up to his reputation as a cinephile’s cinephile. Lovely man, but you could also sense how he could be rigorous enough to make the films he made.