Tous les matins du monde (1991)

User Rating:

7.5/10   

Director:

Alain Corneau

Writers:

Pascal Quignard (scenario & dialogue) and
Alain Corneau (writer)

Release Date:

18 December 1991 (France)

Genre:

Biography | Drama | Music | Romance

Plot:

It's late 17th century. The viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe comes home to find that his wife died while he was away...

Plot Keywords:

Viola | Viola Da Gamba | 1600s | Forbidden Love | Musician

Awards:

Nominated for Golden Globe. Another 8 wins & 5 nominations

Cast

Jean-Pierre Marielle	...	Monsieur de Sainte Colombe
Gérard Depardieu	...	Marin Marais
Anne Brochet	...	Madeleine
Guillaume Depardieu	...	Young Marin Marais
Carole Richert	...	Toinette
Michel Bouquet	...	Baugin
Jean-Claude Dreyfus	...	Abbe Mathieu
Yves Gasc	...	Lequieu
Jean-Marie Poirier	...	Monsieur de Bures
Myriam Boyer	...	Guignotte
Violaine Lacroix	...	Young Madeleine
Nadège Teron	...	Young Toinette
Caroline Sihol	...	Mme. de Sainte Colombe
Yves Lambrecht	...	Charbonnières
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Philippe Duclos	...	Brunet (voice)
Yves Gourvil	...	Lequieu (voice)

Also Known As:

All the Mornings of the World
Every Morning of the World

Runtime:

115 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:L | Australia:M | Argentina:13 | Chile:14 | Finland:K-8 | France:U | Spain:13 | Sweden:11 | UK:12

Filming Locations:

Abbey of Moutier-d'Ahun, Moutier-d'Ahun, Creuse, France

Company:

Film Par Film

Movie Connections:

Referenced in England, My England (1995)

For those of us who have suffered

Les Matins is a film for those who have lived enough of life to know that it is a complex mix of pain and joy, with much of it pain, but much of that pain resulting from the greatest of lost joy. Pain that could even eventually give a form of joy again, if it is introspective and searching enough to move one to realize that devastating pain is merely the other side of ecstatic joy. Interrelated, indivisible, and necessary to each other for the severe lessons they teach us as a result of the strength of their inseparable unity.

This primary point was driven home time after time in Les Matins to the point where even the most abject hardheart would soon feel the story's full impact, that the shallow and mediocre fluff of life, no matter how rich, no matter how acclaimed, cannot provide an offset to the bitter agony of lost perfect love, sublime adoration that is well understood in this particular case never to come again to Sainte-Columbe and would surely be less welcome to him in his suffering than would tortured death, no matter how sweet that new love might be to another person less soul-stricken. As the story formed fully, it was seen that death would eventually be a comfort to him by finally joining him with his adored lost love and thereby ceasing his intense worldly torture. His would be a death that ended our collective hope in the discovery of more elegiac beauty in any future music he could have written, but it served to force us to appreciate more fully the few soulful and heart rending pieces he painfully but adoringly accomplished while writing at his personal creative zenith, his apogee in, and as a result of, paramount human suffering. This is a common theme told in many stories through the years, yes, but it is as real and stunning in this film as was ever done in any medium.

Les Matins is the best film story of an artist I have ever seen due to the honesty in which it understands and conveys to the audience the inescapable agony felt by a fatally tortured, artistic genius, and how that agony moved him to write his greatest music.