TIFF: French director Lelouch shines a quaint light on India

Veteran director Claude Lelouch is at his scintillating best in Un plus une, a witty and tender French love story that pans out entirely in India.

The film is another landmark in the long history of cinematic engagement between the two countries that began with Jean Renoir’s The River in the early 1950s.

The film, set for a world premiere at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), stars Oscar-winning actor Jean Dujardin (The Artist) as a successful, self-absorbed music composer who jets down to India to score for an indie retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story.

Sparks begin to fly as soon as the cynical protagonist, Antoine Abeilard, encounters self-confessed India enthusiast Anna (Elsa Zylberstein), wife of the French ambassador in Delhi (Christophe Lambert), at the official embassy dinner in his honour.

There is no way of telling who of the two is more smitten with the other as the duo undertakes a long train trip down to the south — the lady has a fear of flying.

The voyage takes them to Benaras, where Anna takes a dip in the Ganga. When Antoine reminds her about how polluted the water is, Anna retorts: “I was purifying myself, not cleaning myself.”

Their journey ends in Kerala, where Anna and Antoine meet Mata Amritanandamayi, each with a specific purpose.

But Un plus une is not only about spirituality and healing although the warmth of Amma’s embrace does change the odd pair forever. The film is much more about love, life, passion and the movies.

Embellished with crackling dialogue, wonderful music and delectably seductive scenes that inveigle both the mind and the heart, Un plus une is an exquisitely crafted ode to India.

This film, however, nearly never got made. “When I first landed in India, the country proved to be such a shock that I nearly called off the project,” the 77-year-old French auteur said on the sidelines of TIFF ahead of the first public screening of his latest film.

But his second visit to the country convinced Lelouch that Un plus une could be filmed nowhere else. “I realised that the India, driven by a sense of eternity, was so much like my story,” Lelouch said. “In India, death isn’t the end.”

“No love story is ever simple,” he said. “Every love story is complicated.” The genre, blended in this film with the vast, complex expanse that is India, takes on multiple layers and strands.

The prolific Lelouch’s global fame rests on A Man and a Woman (1966), which fetched him not only the Cannes Palme d’Or but also two Oscars — one for direction and the other for best foreign language film.

He is also the maker of 1981’s Les uns et les autres, a classic musical epic widely counted among his best films.

Un plus une receives the greatest fillip from Lelouch’s proven way with verbal exchanges. Anna asks Antoine: “What is a woman to you ” Antoine’s reply sums up the underlying spirit of the film like nothing else can: “A perfected man.”

The cast of Un plus une also features Alice Pol in the role of a Paris pianist, who is in love with Antoine and follows him to India, besides Rahul Vohra, Shriya Pilgaonkar and Abhishek Krishnan.

By arrangement with Financial chronicle