Beyond the Multiplex

"There is a danger in the costume drama, the period film," Chéreau tells me over a cup of green tea at his hotel in New York's SoHo neighborhood. "It is the danger that you can say, 'It doesn't interest me, it doesn't touch me, they are so far away. That is a tribe -- you know? -- with unusual laws and unusual rules, that has nothing to do with our own now.'

"I was possessed by two contrary ideas. It is always a pleasure to re-create a beautiful past, probably a more beautiful time for wealthy people, by the way, than today. But at the same time you want to say how modern and timeless this story is, meaning it is a story about a man and a woman, a husband and wife, and it doesn't have anything to do with the time. It could happen today. I was so convinced that it could happen today that I didn't see the necessity of bringing it to today."

Contrary ideas seem to be Chéreau's identifying marks; the handsome 61-year-old Parisian is still best known as a revolutionary stage director, in theater and especially in opera. His 1976 staging of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival -- as a sort of Victorian-Marxist revolutionary struggle -- remains one of the most controversial events in the form's recent history.

Yet Chéreau longs to be remembered as a great filmmaker, the heir to the retired or departed big names of the '60s and '70s. He recently accepted a commission from his friend Pierre Boulez, the esteemed conductor, to direct another opera (Janacek's "In the House of the Dead") in Provence and New York. "It's exactly the opposite of what I want to do," he tells me gloomily. "But I said yes, so I have to do it."

Viewers may detect his theatrical background in "Gabrielle," which has two main characters plus a handful of minor supporting roles, and mostly takes place inside one house. That, insists Chéreau, is "an optical illusion." Yes, he says, we are almost always inside the house. "But in theater you cannot show the whole house as I have shown it. You cannot, in theater, show two bedrooms, two bathrooms, the entire wing, the sitting rooms, the dressing rooms, the kitchen. It seems to be theatrical, but it is exactly what the theater cannot do. The theater cannot give me such proximity to the faces, the glances. The theater cannot give me the movement of the camera. The theater cannot give me the entire house, and the house is important; it's the third character in the piece. The theater cannot give me the voiceover, or the black-and-white, or the intertitles."

When I ask Chéreau to explain the film's switches from black-and-white to color and back again, the staccato editing and the disorienting on-screen titles, he laughs genially. "There is no explanation. Just the pleasure or fun of making it," he says. He began with an idea: The film would begin with an antique black-and-white look, as Jean (wonderfully played by the long, lean, sheepdog-esque Greggory, a Chéreau regular) makes his way home through the crowded streets, reflecting on his life. Then the moment of finding the letter would change everything: The scene would shift to color, and total silence would fall.

"Nothing was enough for me in the editing room to emphasize the shock of the letter," he says. "I have a zoom on the letter, with beautiful music -- I was rediscovering the old cinema of the '40s. Then I have a panoramic shot, moving through all the mirrors in the room, finishing with Jean taking the letter and turning it to see his name. Then I thought that wasn't enough. So I replace black-and-white with color, then I have the music, I have a brandy decanter that falls and breaks. How do you describe such an intimate earthquake in the life of this guy? I tried to invent a way of doing it, without asking the actors to explain too much."

What's so invigorating about "Gabrielle," despite its fusty setting and tried-and-true story, is the sense of an artist who's trying things out, more or less making it up as he goes. Chéreau says he wanted an on-screen title to end the film, but was worried that "alone like that it could be an orphan, so we tried to make some relatives for it." The little jump-cuts, and the unexplained repetition of events? "Well, I don't know why," he laughs. "I think it's just good. I cannot explain everything. The grammar of the cinema is that you have one shot from this side of the door and one shot from the other side of the door, and you avoid slamming the door twice. But I did it twice, despite everything I have learned."

Once the black-and-white, or the silence, or the strange intertitles had become part of the film's vocabulary, he says, they assumed their own logic, one he can't easily explain to outsiders. At times Chéreau borrows the logic of the silent movie; at other times the logic of the comic strip. "Of course now I can look at it and say, maybe there is too much black-and-white, or too many titles," he says. "But to know where the boundary is, you have to cross it. I could choose another route that would be less risky. But I am happy to take some risks."

"Gabrielle" opens July 14 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York, July 28 in Boston, and Aug. 4 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.

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