2004 Spring Season Comedie-Franc;aise Photo, Claudine Doury A Hearty Invalid By Leslie (Hoban) Blake Imagine a scenario in which a 51-year-old actor-playwright, at the height of his fame, is playing a hypochondriac in his latest satire-this one about medical quackery-when he collapses onstage and dies. Unbelievable? Well, in 1673 that's exactly what happened to Jean Baptiste Poquelin-better known as Moliere­ when he was starring in his final play, La Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid). Ironically, Moliere actually was something of a hypochondriac, and his critique of the medical profession is as timely today as it was then. Pick up a newspaper or watch late-night infomercia ls, and you'll find phony doctors and pills that promise life-altering changes, not unlike the shams and fake miracle cures encountered by lead character Argan. So it's fitting that the darkness behind his final play is as alive as the humor in Comedie-Fran<;aise's production (Harvey Theater, June 9-13). It's only the fourth time in 25 years that the esteemed French theater has visited New York, and for director Claude Stratz, it's his first staging of a Moliere play. "I'd read all of his works and dreamed of directing one of his plays," says the handsome Swiss director, who is also director of the French National Academy of Dramatic Art (Conservatoire National Superieur d'art Dramatique). "While they're called comedies, I wanted to make sure to capture the underlying melancholic strain that also exists, especially in The Imaginary Invalid." 16 Comedie-Frangaise That melancholic strain is indeed captured with film-noir lighting and music. Stratz, who was a student of Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, also makes use of shadows and underscoring, revealing the nasty truths beneath the comic surface. But Stratz doesn't stint on the musical aspects of the play. Moliere's theater was at the forefront of marrying music and dance to the spoken word, and many of his plays (not unlike some of Shakespeare's) end with a song and a dance. In Invalid they are even more integrated, and Stratz has drawn upon the Italian com media deWarte character of Punchinello the clown for his fantastical interludes. "But the set directions come directly from Moliere," Stratz assures. "He described one simple set and a hand-painted clavichord. Of course, at the Comedie-Frangaise, as in Moliere's own time, we play in repertory, so simple sets are very he lpful. And the sets and costumes we're bringing over are "absolument identique" to the ones in Paris. That clavichord is the heaviest and therefore the most difficult piece to transport." "", Except for a dozen years during the French revolution .. , the company has performed more or less continually- even during two world wars," If you visit Comedie-Frangaise-or La Maison de Moliere, as it is fondly called-on its home turf, a three-theater complex on the Rue de Richelieu, you'll hear the French language spoken so perfectly that even those with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language can usually follow a play. (At BAM, of course, there will be English surtitles.) Comedie-Frangaise's history dates back to 1680, a century before America was even a revolution­ ary glint in some founding father's eye, and seven years after Moliere's death. Louis XIV officially designated it as France's state theater. And except for a dozen years during the French revolution (1792-1804), the company has performed more or less continually--even during two world wars. The acting company is a small society unto itself, with different classes of membership running from apprentices to pensioners. Current artistic director Marcel Bozonnet, who's held that post for four years, entered the troupe as an actor in 1982. He chuckles as he points out, "It's been a long time since they haven't chosen an actor to lead [Comedie-Frangaisel. The [spiritual] founder of our theater was Moliere, and in Moliere's theater today, we still deal with the same kinds of topics he did , reflections of society, in a constant search for a new morality for human beings." Stratz agrees: "The need to make theater remains, I believe, the same. I cannot prove it, of course, but I have the feeling that the motivations, the major desires which push somebody to make theater today are not very different from those which motivated an actor at the time of Shakespeare or Moliere." ~ Brooklyn-born arts journalist Leslie (Hoban) Blake writes for the New York Resident Th e Hollywood Reporter, and Theatermania.com. She is vice president of the Drama Desk. 17 Voice Fi Im Critics' Series Village Voice: Best of 2003 Film Festival A Showcase for Oddities and Imports By Dennis Lim Most film critics' awards tend to blur into a morass of pre-Academy Award prognostication. But the Village Voice's annual poll, a survey of some SO-plus of the nation's most cinephilic film reviewers (drawn mostly from the alternative press), can be relied on to spread the year-end, list­ making love among an idiosyncratic assortment of oddities and imports guaranteed to receive zero attention come Oscar night. Likewise, the Voice/BAMcinematek summer festival (Jun 1-30), based on the results of the poll, exists largely as a showcase for the underseen and the overlooked. Which isn't to say that the program has no time for crowd-pleasers. Included in the current series are two of 2003's most beloved underdogs: Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's droll amnesiac romance, The Man Without a Past, and Peter Sollett's sweet, loose-limbed Loisaida teen comedy, Raising Victor Vargas. There's even a Hollywood hit in the mix: Richard Linklater's triumphant The School of Rock, the year's best and arguably most political studio movie-a timely, rousing attempt to reinstate anti-authoritarian sentiment into the adolescent curriculum, and maybe into adult lives as well. The 25-film "Village Voice: Best of 2003" slate attempts to summarize the year in art-house movie-going. Patterns are retraced and trends encapsulated. Sampling from 2003's crop of enor­ mously popular documentaries, the series offers the kid-centered charm assault of Jeff Blitz's Spellbound to Nicolas Philibert's To Be and to Have. Brit social realism, old- and new-school, are represented by Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen and Michael Winterbottom's In This World . Ever vital Canadian auteurs left their marks-Guy Maddin with his dazzling ballet Dracula and David Cronen berg with the haunting, Beckett-inspired Spider. And Gus Van Sant heroically returned from studio good-will hunting to art-film provocation with Gerry, a pictorially majestic wilderness trek, and Elephant, an ethereal meditation on Columbine focusing on the hallucinatory tranquility of the final countdown. Indeed , many of the year's boldest cinematic experiments are on view: Abbas Kiarostami's offers a textured picture of women in modern-day Tehran in Ten , shot with a digital camera mounted to the dashboard of a moving car. Almost as economical in its own way, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son is a withholding yet boundlessly humane parable of forgiveness. Unknown 20 Voice Fi Im Critics' Series Pleasures, mapping the effects of post-Mao socio-economic convulsions on rootless teens in a moribund Chinese coal-mining town, establishes 33-year-old Jia Zhangke as one of the greats of our time, having perfected, after only three features, an exalted, observational style that owes as much to Robert Bresson as Hou Hsiao-hsien. Especially strong, the program's French selection is also richly diverse. Olivier Assayas' demon lover takes a suitably nasty and seductive approach to its nightmare vision of new-media pornography and multinational capital. Comparatively old-fashioned, Claire Denis' Friday Night infuses a Paris one-night stand with a flavor of skewed enchantment. And Marina de Van 's In My Skin , a tour de force of dermatological and existential horror, is simply the gutsiest debut feature in memory-a literally lacerating film that invites the viewer to look anew at the human body. The Voice poll's Best Undistributed Film category is perhaps its most important, functioning as a rescue mission of sorts. This year's selection of under-the-radar "orphans" is typically global. From Austria, documentarian Ruth Mader's downbeat fiction debut, Struggle, is about an immi­ grant laborer in Vienna. Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky's Koktebel delicately contributes to the growing crop of Russian father-and-son films. Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul enigmatically pays tribute to the joys of lazy afternoon picnics and al fresco sex in Blissfully Yours. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's four-hour Four Shades of Brown is a black-comic symphony of family dysfunction. And from Iceland, there's U.S. director Bradley Rust's Gray's Salt, a teen movie with the jagged aesthetic of the Danish Dogme movement but a most un-Dogme-like sensibility- a heart. Perhaps the strangest entry (and my personal pick of the series), French director Alain Guiraudie's No Rest for the Brave is, as its title suggests, an inexhaustible fount of fearless invention. This remarkable, shape-shifting first feature utterly defies definition: Is it a slacker comedy fueled by sleep deprivation? A rustic road movie that imagines rural life as a languid idyll of rock-and-roll and man-boy love? An existential odyssey in which a questing young hero goes on the run from death, only to confront the inescapable fact of mortality? Unbelievably, all of the above, and probably much more.