THE ACCOMPANIST Movie Review
L'Accompagnatrice
Richard Bohringer, one of the fixtures of contemporary French cinema in films such as The Last Metro, Diva, and Le Grand Chemin, may be best remembered by future generations not as a fine actor but as a great actress's father; Romane Bohringer has been appearing in small roles for years, but in Claude Miller's 1992 The Accompanist she pulled off something surprising and spectacular. In this quietly eloquent drama set during the German occupation of Paris, Bohringer plays the 20-year-old Sophie Vasseur, an aspiring pianist who lands a job as accompanist to a highly regarded singer, Irene Brice (Elena Safonova). Irene and her husband Charles (played by Bohringer's father Richard) are fond enough of their luxurious lifestyle that the viewer becomes suspicious, unsure at first whether the Brice household maintains its privilege through collaboration with the Nazis. Yet The Accompanist turns out to be a far smarter film than such a potential revelation might suggest; before long it's up to Sophie to decide just how far she's willing to go in a deception of her own, when Irene's affair with a member of the resistance becomes apparent to all but her husband. Like all of the films of the exceptionally gifted but unjustly unknown writer-director Claude Miller, The Accompanist is driven more by character than plot, and more by actor than action. As the wide-eyed young woman looking upon a corrupt world with all possibilities before her, Bohringer's performance is both a revelation and the spine of the film. She's called upon to straddle that border between success and selling one's soul, but with none of the clear-cut, rear-view-mirror certainties of a position-paper exercise like István Szabó's Mephisto (1981). From moment to moment, her Sophie seems absolutely real: open, unformed, malleable, and vulnerable. She makes The Accompanist as engrossing and suspenseful as it is disquieting.
NEXT STOP … The Sorrow and the Pity, Europa, Europa, A Self-Made Hero
1993 (PG) 111m/C FR Elena Safonova, Romane Bohringer, Richard Bohringer, Samuel Labarthe, Nelly Borgeaud, Julien Rassam; D: Claude Miller; W: Claude Miller, Luc Beraud, Claude Rich; C: Yves Angelo; M: Alain Jomy. VHS COL