Beaumarchais The Scoundrel Reviews

Fluffier than a souffle and even more insubstantial, Edouard Molinaro's sumptuously designed hagiography of the notorious Marriage of Figaro playwright is strictly eye candy for the PBS set. It opens in 1773, where history finds the twice-widowed ex-clockmaker Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (Fabrice Luchini) rehearsing his latest, The Barber of Seville, while bravely denouncing the French aristocracy in a court of law. The film races through a few swashbuckling episodes of the playwright's life before it screeches to a halt in 1784, panting for air: secret agent Beaumarchais in England for a secret rendezvous with an enigmatic transvestite; arms dealer Beaumarchais during the American Revolution; popular author Beaumarchais writing enduring plays that capture the rebellious spirit of pre-Revolutionary France. French filmmakers, with a long, venerable history of costume films behind them, have gotten this sort of breezy biopic down to a science, and Molinaro and company flog the formula enthusiastically: brisk plotting, a swordfight or two, countless bursting bodices and an awful lot of fuzzy history. With little time devoted to the whys and wherefores, this inconsequential film ultimately overstates its own importance as well as Beaumarchais's. To suggest that the blur of events presented here in any way constitutes a history, or that Figaro and its brethren were directly responsible for the bloody revolution that was to follow, is simply ludicrous.