Film pierces socialist monarch’s veil

Francois Mitterrand, who was in office longer than any other French head of state since Napoleon III, always seemed comfortable in the role ...

Francois Mitterrand, who was in office longer than any other French head of state since Napoleon III, always seemed comfortable in the role of socialist monarch.

Publicly aloof, secretively manipulative, privately seductive, he orchestrated his every public appearance to project an image popular and regal. When he died in January 1996, eight months after retiring, he remained a mystery. The idea that Mitterrand should be resuscitated on screen so soon after his death, then, was bound to stir interest here. No other postwar French president, not even de Gaulle, has been the subject of a feature film.

Mitterrand’s political record, though, is not the main theme of Robert Guediguian’s Promeneur du Champs de Mars (the English title is The Last Mitterrand). Rather, the movie focuses on a more personal Lear-like drama: of the final months of a proud, complex and cultivated ruler who watches helplessly as his power, reputation and life ebb away.

For Guediguian, it recounts ‘‘the death of a king.’’

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A co-writer of Le Promeneur is Georges-Marc Benamou, a journalist who recorded conversations with the ailing French president and included them in his 1997 memoir, The Last Mitterrand. Friends of Mitterrand denounced the book as an act of betrayal, but Benamou replied that Mitterrand himself had told him: ‘‘Write it down, write down everything and tell them I’m not the devil.’’

Central to the movie, which has done well at the box office since opening here on Feb. 16, is the old man’s dialogue with death, a subtle portrayal of Mitterrand by 79-year-old Michel Bouquet. The film revolves around conversations between Mitterrand and Antoine Moreau (Jalil Lespert), a young journalist loosely modeled after Benamou.

The movie does not let Mitterrand off lightly. While he claims to have joined the Resistance in 1942, Moreau finds evidence suggesting the break with Vichy came a year later. Still murkier is Mitterrand’s friendship with Rene Bousquet, the Vichy police chief who in 1942 sent thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. While angrily denying that he was anti-Semitic, Mitterrand remained loyal to Bousquet even after he was murdered in 1993.

Le Promeneur also shows a more sympathetic side of the president, notably when Paris-Match discloses that he has a grown daughter outside his marriage. ‘‘I can’t understand all this hullabaloo,’’ he says. ‘‘If I’d had a six-month-old baby, OK, but she’s 20.’ He then adds: ‘‘She’s lovely, isn’t she? She looks like a romantic actress.’’

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Mitterrand’s fascination with actresses was no secret. In Benamou’s book, he is poetic about Juliette Binoche. In the movie, he fantasizes about lunching with Julia Roberts. ‘‘I’d ask if the story is true about the legs in Pretty Women not being hers,” he says. ‘‘No, I can’t ask her something like that. That’s being indiscreet.’’

Still, in the end, proud to have outwitted his enemies, Mitterrand seems confident of his place in history. ‘‘You know, Antoine, and I say this without being presumptuous,” he remarks after they visit the royal crypt at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, “I’m the last of the great presidents. I mean, the last in a line from de Gaulle. Because of Europe, globalization, nothing will be as before. It’s sad but it’s the truth.” —NYT