In making Molière, which opens in the U.S. on July 25, Laurent Tirard has taken at least a leaf or two from John Madden's Shakespeare In Love. There are the same urban vistas (dirt, cobblestones, a sleeping drunk) and the familiar tropes of artistic inspiration--which is to say, much whittling and chewing of the quill. And both films squeeze some of their antic energy out of the opposition between grubby groundlings and the impossibly pampered aristocracy.


That said, there are some major differences, starting with the protagonists. Joseph Fiennes made a suitably glamorous Bard. Romain Duris, who did a marvelous turn as a piano-playing thug in Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), is something else entirely. With his scarred, overhanging brow and squashed-in features, he has the look of an Elizabethan stoner. As the young Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (who probably dubbed himself Molière in order to put some distance between himself and his disapproving family), Duris has two basic settings: tortured and manic. Luckily there's enough comedy here to offset his glowering intensity, including a quick shimmy down the drainpipe and some animal impressions that would do Disney proud.

As for the plot, Tirard and his cowriter, Grégoire Vigneron, have fleshed out a mysterious chapter of Molière's life. In 1644, the penniless actor was thrown in jail by his creditors, then released--only to surface several months later for a career-making tour of the provinces. Scholars have never been able to determine what Molière was up to during these missing months. In the film, he's been pressed into service as an acting coach by Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), a bourgeois gentilhomme with a serious crush on the obnoxious, porcelain-skinned Célimene (Ludivine Sagnier). If Molière will help him to refine his amorous technique, Jourdain will pay off his debts.

Oh, and there's an additional wrinkle: Madame Jourdain, played by the delicious Laura Morante, must be kept out of the loop. To accomplish this, Molière is smuggled into the household as a cleric, Monsieur Tartuffe. And having played this self-reflexive card, the screenwriters go on to pillage a good many bits from Tartuffe (1664). Here, they suggest, is the raw material from which Molière would eventually derive his signature work.

Tirard keeps us laughing. The very sight of Duris in his absurd clerical gear is a continuous source of amusement: it's like seeing Frank Zappa play Friar Tuck. But Molière's depth--that penetration of human frailty which led Richard Wilbur, his best American translator, to call Tartuffe a "deep comedy"--is a more elusive thing. Duris himself might have latched on to it. Luchini, however, applies a broader touch to his role, and Edouard Baer, as a cartoonishly sleazy count with a Technicolor wardrobe, seems to have wandered in from some Mel Brooks extravaganza. The moral of the story? That great art is founded on renunciation--and that unhappiness, as the dying Madame Jourdain reminds her favorite playwright, "has comic aspects that one should never underestimate."