M  O  V  I  E  S

Ms. Cleavage goes to Versailles in ridiculous French film

"Ridicule" | Directed by Patrice Leconte

By LAURA MILLER if the promotional campaign for Patrice Leconte's "Ridicule" has convinced you that this French film will feed your appetite for the hothouse sexual intrigue of Stephen Frear's 1988 film, "Dangerous Liaisons," guess again. Frears — working from the stage play based on Choderlos de Laclos' novel of seduction and betrayal among the 18th century Gallic aristocracy — served up a dish of exquisite Old World depravity, even if the movie did emerge from Hollywood. Leconte's tale of a poor country nobleman who visits the court of Louis XV seeking the funds to drain the festering swamp back home has, despite its nation of origin, a heart of American cheese. Europeans, with their overcivilized, Machiavellian subtleties, are supposed to corrupt wholesome American idealists. Instead, it seems, we've ruined them. Decades of our pop culture at its sentimental, simplistic worst have blunted their edge. "Ridicule," for all its powdered wigs, brocade and candleglow, is essentially "Mr. Smith Goes to Versailles." The film begins with a minor character pissing on a decrepit old nobleman who once insulted him in court and ruined his reputation. These are the bad people. Next, we have our hero, the impoverished Gregoire Ponceludon de Malavoy (Charles Berling), fretting selflessly about his swamp-plagued peasants and carrying around a sick, raggedy child with a bandaged head until he just can't take it anymore and resolves to ask Louis XV for help. He, you see, is one of the good people. From there, it gets heavy-handed. "Wit," we are informed by the opening titles, "is king" in this court. Ponceludon, a provincial nobody, hopes that his quick tongue will win him the monarch's attention and support. It's a historically dubious premise, and the film's many other inaccuracies undermine it further. They would be forgivable if "Ridicule" actually sparkled with cleverness and bon mots. Unfortunately, the characters talk about wit much more than they exhibit it. Instead, they banter crudely, trading insults like family members in a bad sitcom or Borscht belt comics at a celebrity roast. This type of sophisticated entertainment, when it works, hinges on the glamour of evil. We may recoil from the cold-blooded villains, but we also thrill to their poise, their charisma, the smooth way they manipulate others. They're genuinely tempting, and therefore dangerous. In "Ridicule," the courtiers are supercilious, middle-aged and overly-made-up, and their gambits as puerile as the urination in the opening scene. Instead of scheming and seducing, they make fun of the handicapped and cheat at party games. They're decadent in a silly, repellent way, obviously bad from square one, like the snotty teenage in-crowd in one of John Hughes' high school comedies from the 1980s. According to the logic of "Ridicule," if "witty" people are wicked, then virtuous people must be dull and insipid. The movie's primary proponent of goodness is Matilde, Ponceludon's humorless love interest. She's played by Judith Godreche, one of that genre of pretty, plump-lipped French starlets so numerous that they must be bred somewhere in the country, perhaps near those farms where geese are force-fed with funnels to make foie gras. In an attempt to flesh out her character and add a prim, feminist note, the filmmakers have made her a defiant amateur scientist with a homemade diving suit. The inert Godreche — who resembles a large stuffed doll — fails miserably to convince. (They might have had better luck with one of the geese.) What she lacks in animation, however, she makes up in cleavage; this impressive attribute has a tendency to entirely take over her scenes. Leconte permits none of the ambiguities or lightness of touch that make for a sophisticated comedy of manners. Everything from deaf-mutes to a Sioux warrior is paraded across the screen to demonstrate the courtiers' shallow nastiness, while Matilde sniffs and swells The Cleavage with righteous outrage. Leconte doesn't so much coax or tease or charm his audience toward the moral of "Ridicule" as drive us like sheep, as if this were a TV movie about social injustice. The result is a waste of two fine talents — Berling, debuting an alert, intelligent screen presence, and the sublime Fanny Ardant, who plays the king's mistress. How depressing to find that under the period finery of "Ridicule" lies the same hamfisted, obvious moralizing of bad television and mainstream fare like "Mr. Holland's Opus" — and in French, no less. If we want to be patronized, after all, we can get that without subtitles.