Cover with Alice Krige On Set

Radio Times October 30 - November 5, 1993

Gallic Charmer

In BBC1's version of the lavish French classic Scarlet And Black, the scenery is almost as seductive as the young hero. By Chris Middleton
It's 7.00 a.m. In a sunlit corner of south-eastern France, and the smell of fried eggs and bacon runs rampant down the corridors of the Château de Merona. Since the 12th century, this sleepy little castle has seen many different invaders sprout up along the mile-long meadow in which it stands.
   In the past, they used to come on horseback, bearing the insignia of medieval potentates. Today, however, they arrive in vans and lorries, with BBC stickers on the windscreens.
   The château is only the latest location in the area to have been taken over by the small mobile army that makes up the Scarlet and Black film crew. As elsewhere, the occupation has been swift and total. Cables completely encircle the building, leading through woodsheds, across lawns, behind a papier-mâché arbour, round a turret, down a stone wall, past an ants' nest, finally trailing up into the innards of some monstrous lightning truck.
   In the castle courtyard, a small mob of early 19th century peasants perch on fountains and window-sills, eating sausage, fried mushrooms and tomatoes off paper plates. It's as if the entire château has been overrun by French revolutionaries with a penchant for full English breakfasts. Striding through this mass of rustic brown worsted comes the slender, dark-suited figure of Scarlet and Black's Julien Sorel (Ewan McGregor). Instantly, all eyes follow his progress.
   McGregor may have been born in West Perthshire, he may have fair hair that has been dyed black for the part, and he may be able to command only a few phrases of French but, to the watching throng, he is Stendhal's young hero, the ambitious son of a rural carpenter who rises through the ranks of army (scarlet) and clergy (black) to the heart of society, where he sets about sdeucing the most eligible young women of Paris.
   To the inhabitants of the Franche-Comté region, the innocent but scheming young Sorel is a folk hero, ranking alongside another local celebrity, Rouget de Lisle, composer of the Marseillaise.
   You might think that a people renowned for their reluctance to allow English words into their vocabulary might similarly object to a cross-channel film crew plundering their countryside. But the reverse seems to be the case.
   In the course of their six-week stay the Scarlet and Black crew has taken over Besançon cathedral and erected a fake altar, closed down half of the Old Quarter in Lyon and held up traffic everywhere from Dôle to Dijon. Twentieth-century telegraph wires, TV aerials and bus shelters have been temporarily uprooted, tractor drivers have been asked to turn off their engines during the filming of rural scenes and, on lampposts and farm gates across the countryside, there have sprung up swarms of red and black arrows, pointing the way to the next location.
   Despite all this, local reaction to the crew has remained friendly, and mayors throughout the region have been extending a warm welcome wherever the costume trucks have come to rest. At a reception in Lons-le-Saunier (population 22, 000), director Ben Bold (the son of screenwriter Robert) and producer Rosalind Wolfes are presented with facsimiles of the Marseillaise.
   A few days later, at pretty little Mouthier Haute-Pierre (population 357), mayor and local builder Michel Louys offers free sparkling wine and suggests that Scarlet and Black will benefit the area beyond mere cash from the hiring out of the village hall. "We hope that your film will bring our beautiful region to the attention of your viewers," he tells the crew, thus, no doubt, echoing the thoughts of any local digniatry who has seen what the BBCtv series Bergerac has done for Jersey or what Howards' Way did for Southampton.
   As it turns out, M Louys may be in luck, since, in Scarlet and Black, the scenery undoubtedly takes a co-starring role. Much of the action takes place either beside rushing streams, looking down on to picture postcard villages, or knee-deep in flower-dotted pastures. Meanwhile, the rocky Jura mountains, with their distinctive, Mohican-style stripes of greenery, are dramatic witnesses to the passions that take place in their shadow.
   Although the region eventually chosen for filming was the precise area in which Stendhal set his novel, other parts of France were also considered.
   "We looked at the Pyrenees," says Wolfes, "but thought they were too pointed," In the same way, various different locations have been combined in the film to represent a single town. Paris, for example, is played by Lyon and Besançon, with a bit of Dijon thrown in.
   Similar care has gone into the human casting. Says Bolt, "The first thing that struck me on reading the book was that, if we couldn't get the right Julien, it wasn't worth making the film at all."
   A mixture of passion and level-headedness, of innocence and sex appeal was what was required, and it came in the form of 22-year old McGregor, fresh from his role es the streetwise Hopper in Dennis Potter's Lipstick on Your Collar. "Extraordinarily proud, angry, arrogant and brave," is how McGregor sees Julien Sorel. "He is driven by this obsessive desire to succeed, yet he never purposely does anyone any harm."
   Any similarities, one wonders, between the actor and the character he plays? The young Scot gazes out over the field in which, as Julien, he has spent a sunny morning catching butterflies. "I am very ambitious, I suppose," he says. "I always wanted to be an actor, and I took no notice of people who tried to put me off. It was the same with getting this part. The first time I went to see Ben, I got the impression I wasn't what he was looking for. The second time, I was determined to make him change his mind."
   It's with a similar mixture of single-mindedness and straightforwardness that Julien causes the hitherto strait-laced Mme de Rénal (played by Alice Krige), wife of the local, baggy-trousered mayor M de Rénal (Martin Jarvis), to stray from the paths of respectability.
   "Love comes out of the blue for her," says Krige, late of the RSC and now living in Los Angeles. "It's the last thing she wants or even looks for, but when it comes, it forces her to choose between what society deems necessary and correct, and what she feels is undeniably and irrefutably right for herself."
   Not surprisingly, M de Rénal sees his wife's feelings as altogether more deniable and refutable than she does. However, Jarvis has resisted the temptation to play the business-minded mayor as a buffoon, remarking of his character: "He's amiable, intelligent, a little snobbish perhaps, but he's a decent man who, in his own fashion, does love his wife. In many ways, he presents a viable a case for fidelity as she does for infidelity."
   It's the sparks caused by the clash of these conflicitng arguments - love versus reputation, honesty versus ambition, worldliness versus other-worldliness - that ignite the flames that eventually engulf the main charactes. With this powerful mixture of joy and remorse, sex and revenge, selfishness and selflessness, Le Rouge et le Noir is about as definitively French a novel as you can get.
   Does Xavier de Merona, owner of the château where today's filming is taking place, not feel the slightest sense of pique, then, at seeing his ancestral home taken over by a British film crew and a local hero falling into foreign hands?
   He smiles and shakes his head. Upkeep of the château is an expensive business, he explains, and the money raised from hiring it out will help to keep the family (where it has been for five centuries).
   As for the British commandeering Stendhal's masterpiece, he is even less concerned: "Monsieur," he replies politely "Le Rouge et le Noir is a classic, on the shelves of every family home in France. Why should we not be happy to share it with the rest of the world?"