The cinema is a world of its own, there are thousands of others in every film, and the big film buffs among filmmakers are well aware of this. Films by Christophe Honoré, for example, are a box of references, and yet unmistakably his own, shaped by his own view of the world. “Room 212 – In a magical night”, for example, takes up the classics of married comedies, but also at least one horror film that he turns upside down, and again and again the films of his greatest hero Jacques Demy, who was the master of Mélo musicals: “Room 212” is inspired by music, by chansons and Barry Manilow’s “Could it be Magic” and the spirit of the fantastic composer Michel Legrand, and at some point flakes fall in the glaring artificial light until it looks as if Honoré had filmed in a snow globe.
The marriage is over, but the film is no guide
It shows a marriage in the end, Maria (Chiara Mastroianni, whose mother Catherine Deneuve snapped it down in Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) had lover after lover, and when her husband Richard (Benjamin Biolay) finds out, he endures it not.
Figures from all phases of the law professor’s life land in bed. Including a younger version of her husband, his former lover.
(Photo: Olymp Film)
For Chiara Mastroianni, who looks more and more like her father Marcello, the law professor is a wonderful diva-like appearance without a guilty conscience, in Cannes, where the film premiered – even before the pandemic, he is one of those who have long been in the Having held out on hold – she received the Un Certain Regard Acting Award for it. He didn’t want a paternalistic view of marriage, says Christophe Honoré, and that’s the other way around here – here it’s the man who remains lonely in the apartment. But Maria leaves, crosses the street and rents a hotel in room 212. The number is no accident – that is the paragraph in the Civil Code that states that married couples owe each other respect, loyalty and support.
Maria does not stay alone in her paragraph room for long. There she meets the ghosts of the past – Richard as a young man, the woman he loved before her, past affairs (the university she works at was her hunting ground), her mother, who is also a Charles Aznavour impersonator included. But they are good spirits, with some of them she will soon end up in bed – but all of them reproach her, and Maria does not want to see what is supposed to be wrong with her sexual wanderlust. This creates a kind of doll’s house of memories, in which she rearranges her feelings, and at some point even old Richard meets young Richard and the former lover and briefly flirts with a completely different life plan, with the child that Maria did not want to have. But Maria drives off and looks for this woman (Carole Bouquet) – it turned out very differently, and Richard would have no place in this life either.
It goes back and forth between places and times and different versions of characters, in short: there is narrative anarchy. If you are looking for an inner logic, a real basis, you will not find anything – “Room 212” is not a marriage guide for couples whose love is getting on in years, but a small, crazy, poetic description of the state. Nothing stands with both feet on the ground, but the feelings that Honoré ascribes to his characters and lures out of his audience are still the right ones, a comical, perplexed melancholy.
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What Richard and Maria should do now, they do not find out. All love, says Richard, arises from memory. It is not true that in old films everything always falls into place, the scene in the “Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, in which the snowflakes fall on Catherine Deneuve in the glaring artificial light, is a farewell forever. Not everyone has to keep up with the times. Honoré treats his characters much more gently, as if he had taken them to his heart. Is that modern? Probably not. “Room 212” is a film like a chanson from the sixties or a film music by Michel Legrand: sentimental and moving and beguilingly beautiful.
Chambre 212, France 2019 – Directed and written by Christophe Honoré. Camera: Rémy Chevrin. With: Chiara Mastroianni, Benjamin Biolay, Vincent Lacoste, Camille Cottin, Carole Bouquet. Distributor: Olymp Film, 86 minutes.