Director: Safy Nebbou
Screenplay: Safy Nebbou, Gilles Taurand
Producers: Marc de Bayser, Dominique Janne, Frank Le Wita
Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Benoît Poelvoorde, Dominique Blanc, Mélanie Thierry, Catherine Mouchet
MPAA Rating: PG
Running time: 105 min.

(3/5)

Things I recently learned about Alexandre Dumas: he was of mixed race, a flamboyant womanizer and he had a collaborator. Actually, he had a number of collaborators but the most frequent and the one featured in Safy Nebbou’s L’autre Dumas was Auguste Maquet, the man who worked with Dumas on “The Three Musketeers” and its sequels among a number of other books before the two finally parted ways.

I’m neither familiar with the history or enough of Dumas’ work to know if any of the material in Nebbou’s film is historically accurate and a dramatized account of events or whether the entire thing is fictitious but the story starts with Dumas and Maquet heading to the coast for a refresher while preparing a new novel. The smart innkeeper has a suite named after the famous author who frequents the establishment and sets him up in the grand room but Dumas, feeling shut-in and requiring fresh air, switches rooms with Maquet. A simple enough switch but you already know where this is going don’t you? Enter Charlotte, a beautiful young woman who has come in search of the author in hopes that she can convince him to help her free her father, a man accused of treason.

Smitten, the usually straight laced Maquet pretends to be Dumas and gets himself embroiled in a slowly, occasionally hilarious in how quickly it gets out of hand, escalating plot to overthrow the Monarchy and without even knowing it, the real Dumas finds himself in the middle of it all. Nebbou’s film slowly frays the relationship between the two men and as the plot thickens, Maquet finds himself at odds with Dumas and the friendly relationship between the two writers begins to disintegrate as they argue over who the real writer is, who created the famous stories and characters that solely bare Dumas’ name – and all of this to the backdrop of a troubled France on the brink of revolution.

L’autre Dumas could easily have fallen apart. The story, though focusing on the relationship between the two men, seems to span their entire working relationship, their personal lives and the history of the period. It could have been a complete disaster but the script, adapted from a play by Cyril Gely and Eric Rouquette, focuses only on the characters and their immediate story, weaving the rest of the threads in and out so that we glimpse the bigger story and understand the consequences while never being bogged down by the details. But that’s also a problem: it’s never quite clear how serious those consequences are. Will it mean death for either man or simply a slap on the wrist by those in power?

But the consequences, or more accurately the lack thereof, are a far off thought at the hands of a great cast led by Benoît Poelvoorde as Maquet and as much as I liked his portrayal of the man, I was more taken by some of the others including Gérard Depardieu as the bombastic Dumas, Mélanie Thierry who introduces Charlotte as a timid young woman in search of help and believably turns the table to display an enterprising revolutionary. I was also really taken with the women in both Maquet and Dumas’ lives. Catherine Mouchet and Dominique Blanc are wonderful as supportive wives/lovers who also know and understand much more than their partners could ever imagine, particularly Mouchet who steals a few scenes at a masquerade ball where the entire charade falls apart.

I didn’t find L’autre Dumas particularly memorable but I found myself enjoying the luscious costumes and scenery, the characters and the mostly light hearted walk through a bit of history; be it accurate of otherwise.

L’autre Dumas has been available on DVD and Blu-Ray since May 17th.

DVD Extras: No extras on the DVD.