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Amfiteater, letn. 12, št. 1, 2024
UDK 791.31:792
792:791.31
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2024-1/14-40

Abstract
The paper discusses Philippe le Guay’s film Alceste à bicyclette (2013) through the lenses
of the historical controversy generated by the pressure to choose between the two main
characters of Molière’s Le Misanthrope – Alceste and Philinte – as incarnations of two
radically different temperaments and moral attitudes. Besides its obvious intertextual
links to the famous 17th-century piece, as well as its outstanding appreciation of the art
of acting – and of the role of ageing in the acting profession – the film is, however,
intriguing insofar as it not only produces but also explicitly thematises a clash between
the supposed out-datedness of the classical comedy and the fact that placed in the new
context, the genre nevertheless manages to reinstate its initial subversive impact.

Keywords: Molière, Le Misanthrope, Alceste à bicyclette, acting, theatre-within-film

Lada Čale Feldman is a full professor and the chair of Theatre Studies at the Department
for Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
in Croatia. Her research areas are theatre and performance studies, as well as feminist
criticism. Besides her seven authored and two co-authored books in Croatian, she has
also co-edited several special issues of journals and numerous collections, including two in
English. She is the recipient of three national and one international awards.
lcfeldma@ff.unizg.hr

Alceste à bicyclette and Molière’s Melancholic
Comedy: A Rejuvenation or a Turn Off?
Lada Čale Feldman
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia

My contribution concerns a rather complex, although not necessarily a very fashionable
and popular topic, namely the archetypal quality of the classical, or classicist, comedy
and its eventual contemporary uses and/or reverberations. I decided to address this
question since the very issue of “the survival of comedy”, which suggests both the
obstacles this survival encountered and the actual resilience of the genre, necessarily
presupposes taking account of its full historical arch to be then able to discuss its
modern, or should I say post-modern – or post-dramatic – or no-longer dramatic
reformulations. I could have perhaps picked up the topic of contemporary mise-enscènes of classical comedies. However, I chose to discuss a relatively strange or rare
case of theatre-within-film for two interconnected reasons, the first being, of course,
the fact that the film I am going to talk about, Alceste à bicyclette, reinterprets one of
Molière’s most famous pieces, Le Misanthrope – about which I have for a long time
dreamt of writing – but the second, more generally relevant, reason has to do with the
meta-theatrical and meta-generic implications of this trans-medial hybrid, that is, in
this specific case, with the fact that the film I have chosen engages in the explicit and
implicit reflection upon the pertinent features, the legacy and the eventual appeal a
classical comedy could have for the contemporary audience, whether in the theatre
or the cinema.

The 350th anniversary of Molière’s death – which in 2023 followed the previous,
more joyful, 400th anniversary of the playwright’s birth – certainly prompts one to
remember that the French actor and author is deemed to have invented a new kind
of comedy, called in French, la grande comédie, or, in English, high comedy. The latter
term, however, does not exactly match the sense of the French coinage since it does
not necessarily mean a comedy of the salon but mostly refers to the more lofty or more
serious – satirical and other – ambitions that Molière wanted to attribute to what was
in his time considered to be a lower-ranked genre nearing the vulgarity of the farce. Let
me, therefore, remind you that the playwright himself never refrained from absorbing
farcical features and episodic moments into his plays, such as lazzis and other comic

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situations from commedia dell’arte, combining them with the rules of the construction
of the plot and with the endless permutations of a few stock elements inherited from
Plautus and commedia erudita. Molière added to these not only the length of a five-act
play but also rhetorically and philosophically demanding tirades. Often, however, in
doing so, he shattered the joyful logic of the genre by thwarting pending marriages, as
in Les Femmes savantes, or by making the plot lead to closely escaped tragic endings, as
in Tartuffe, or, indeed, by introducing truly fateful, unhappy ones, in which – as in Don
Juan – characters do die on the stage (or rather, under it, since Don Juan is at the end
ineluctably pulled by the Commander down to the underworld).

One of the most representative pieces, and the most commented upon, of this new,
more complex, if not even, so to speak, more “realistic” genre which came to be
called comédie de caractère – and was conceived to match the status of tragedy
Molière never had the chance to excel in despite his initial fervent efforts –
remains to this day Le Misanthrope, a play that generated numerous and harshly
conflicting interpretations whose sheer number made its contradictory protagonist
Alceste rank among the kin of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, being equally susceptible, as
John Simon would put it, to become an emblematic embodiment “of the various
sensibilities of individuals in different eras, indeed of the collective sensibilities
of these eras themselves” (404). Surely, it is appropriate to evoke here the most
famous of all theatre characters in the Western tragic tradition, since Alceste and
Hamlet do share many traits, first of all, a most disturbing state of mind – disturbing,
that is, for the surrounding characters, and, in Alceste’s case, for the very spirit of
comedy – namely, melancholy. Like Hamlet, Alceste also feels and craves isolation
from his immediate and broader social circle. He also accuses the woman he loves
of coquettishness and betrayal and, also like Hamlet, cultivates a keen interest and
refinement in matters of ethics and aesthetics. We could even say that he as well
harbours suicidal thoughts, for hanging oneself is the idea that reappears a couple
of times during the play. We have equally strong reasons to realise that all this
fussing about the perniciousness of human nature is, to a large extent, symptomatic
of a ridiculous, choleric1 and narcissistic self-dramatisation, a generically misplaced
perception the hero has of himself as a misfit and tragic outcast, while, in fact,
eagerly yearning to be distinguished by the very society that he rejects and loved by
the woman who incarnates all the mundane evils he so adamantly condemns.
1 I thank Professor Jure Gantar for inquiring, after my lecture, on Molière’s reliance on the theory of humours and the typology
of personalities derived from it, which is in the background, for instance, of some plays of the Elizabethan period in England.
The full title of the French play is (Le) Misanthrope, ou l’ atrabilaire amoureux, which would suggest such a connection. Indeed,
atrabilaire referred at the time to the “black bile”, which originally suggested the prevalence of the melancholic mood coupled
with “intellectual and moral seriousness” (cf. Morgan 299), while “yellow bile” was supposed to characterise the choleric, that
is, an irritable and bad-tempered man. In time, however, atrabilaire lost its lofty melancholic association and acquired meanings
usually accruing around a choleric type: acariâtre, acerbe, aigre, coléreux, irascible, renfrogné, revêche (Dictionnaire Larousse).
Molière seems to play with both connotations – and that is why, as shall be argued in this article, his protagonist remains such an
ambivalent figure and a puzzle since his comicality seems to result precisely from the tension between the melancholic and the
choleric sides of his nature.

Our awareness that Molière himself has played the part only adds to the suspicions
that melancholy is perhaps not the dominant mode/mood of the piece, that the actor’s
interpretation must have contributed to farcical situations and performative accents
the comedy also contains – the battle of the sexes, the quarrel between the would-be
tyrant and a clever woman who deceives him, the expressive miming and extravagant
gestures suggested to be accompanying Alceste’s abrupt comings and goings before
and after his quarrelsome confrontations2. And yet, as Andrew Calder hurries to add
after having enumerated these farcical aspects of the Misanthrope, the comedy also
displays some of the structural features of tragedy, for “characters in farce and tragedy
equally are victims of their own temperaments; their inflexibility is a kind of fate”; in
the Misanthrope specifically, they are “so saddled with their particular temperaments
and worldviews that no amount of affection or love can change them” (96). Knowing
indeed what kind of fate awaits Alceste and Célimène, we have to admit that, after all,
instead of following the age-old comic formula and celebrating a happy marital union,
they do end up being almost tragically ill-matched and therefore have to separate,
leaving the stage to a more auspicious marriage between Célimène’s cousin Éliante
and Alceste’s friend Philinte.

Ever since the 1950s, theatre directors, as well as a couple of cinematic ones3, have
delighted in putting the play on stage or filming it in modern dress, often, however, to
emphasise precisely its gloomy, if not downright tragic undertones, as Patrice Pavis
recently demonstrated in his commentary of the three most prominent theatre versions
of the play in the new millennium, by Jean-Pierre Miquel (Comédie-Française, VieuxColombier, 2000), Stéphane Braunschweig (Théâtre National de Strasbourg, 2003) and
Clément Hervieu-Léger (Comedie-Française, 2017), in particular. Michael Edwards
wrote about the same phenomenon in his recently re-edited book titled Molière’s
laughter, Le rire de Molière, in which he exposes such attempts at pessimistically reconfiguring the comedy to be a result of an “error of interpretation” that thoroughly
misses the original comic point of The Misanthrope, which was, after all, to make
Molière’s contemporaries laugh at their own inadequacies, both as individuals and
as members of a highly ritualised and therefore necessarily hypocrite society (141).
Now, this proneness to take Alceste in particular seriously is a tendency said to be
stemming from the notorious attack on Molière’s cruel ridiculing of the protagonist
mounted by Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose admiration for Alceste is often evoked as
a mark of a new, republican sensibility. But, when encountered today, it makes one
wonder where and why the hilarious aspect of the comedy vanished and whether
this propensity for tears over the misunderstood loner and the love gone wrong is
2 As Herzel rightly puts it, “We may regret that we cannot see Molière perform the leading roles of L’Amour medecin
or Le Medecin malgré lui or Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, but it is not likely that this loss has fundamentally altered our
understanding of the tone of those plays. But Molière himself in the role of Alceste? Our loss is incalculable, and we need
to be reminded of that fact” (348).
3 Bernard Dhéran in 1958 and Pierre Dux in 1971.

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the sign of our times, whether it testifies to a kind of moralistic sentimentalism and
the current impossibility to actually humorously confront the very mixed feelings
generated by the play’s intricacies, let alone to savour its hidden meta-dramatic irony.

The entire history of the critical reception of the play could, to be sure, figure as such a
sign of the not-so-changing times after all, for even well before Rousseau, from the very
start of the stage fortune of the Misanthrope, rare have been the members of the public
who have found this comedy funny, so that for long it suffered a moderate success in the
theatre and was even proclaimed to be more of a good reading than a title promising
an enjoyable performance. Such a critical stance of both the public and the critics of
Molière’s age, according to Lionel Gossman, could itself be considered as proof of
their own melancholic disposition: on many accounts, Alceste managed to intimately
relate to the 17th-century spectator, representing as the protagonist does a rightful if
not righteous melancholic resentment of the domesticated nobility which reluctantly
acquiesced to the rules of Louis XIV’s court, where sickness and melancholy were not
abided, and any public manifestation of withdrawal was considered to be “inadmissible,
a provocation, a dangerous indication of dissidence and potential subversiveness”
(334). Since Molière was however dependent upon the king’s protection and therefore
expected to subscribe to all the aims of the new absolutist state, according to Gossman,
he simply had to make this “type” appear as a “comic figure”, much like the rest of his
comic paternal tyrants, who are all, like Alceste, “preoccupied with conservation and
retention, dead set against novelty, mobility, change, and exchange, the circulation of
goods and of money, the free circulation of women and of signs – everything that might
unsettle the established order of things” (328).
Nevertheless, many a later critic of Misanthrope continued to be puzzled by the
ambiguities that permeate the play and hardly tolerated not taking sides when it comes
to the principal character and, with it, the generic atmosphere he generates: judging
from the accumulated interpretations, one often simply has to choose, either the
protagonist is a misogynistic, irrational choleric, the society which he attacks because
of its hypocrisy is in the right, and the piece is a comedy, or Alceste is an upright
and truthful man, and, as we heard, a politically subversive melancholic, the society
outrageously unjust and the piece is a drama with an almost tragic ending. No wonder
such an ambiguity proved to be a favourable ground for a fine typology proposed by
the psychoanalytic critic Francesco Orlando, who saw in these contentions various
manifestations of the effects of the comic repression of the seriousness of the issues
at stake (259–261):
Variant A – the serious is unconscious because the comic structure represses it;

Variant B – the serious is conscious but not accepted; the comic structure precariously
wins over;

Variant C – the serious is accepted but not advocated; the comic structure is just a
façade, a concession made to the king;
Variant D – the serious is advocated but not authorised (littérature engagée).

I do not have enough time here to enter into the details of his argumentation, so let
me point out that, according to Orlando, an astonishing number of critics find it hard
to tolerate variants A and B, in which there is a precarious balance between the comic
and the serious, whether the latter is repressed or acknowledged, and rather opt for
the rest of the two, in which the seriousness prevails, even though Orlando’s analysis
manages to prove to what extent variants C and D are rather difficult to back up by the
close structuralist reading that he provides in his study.

Be that as it may, the play stirred such opposite reactions due largely also to two
strange couplings in which the protagonist is placed, the first an amicable and the
second an amorous one, in such a way that the aforementioned siding of the audience
often depends upon sympathies it cultivates for either the unwaveringly offended
Alceste on one side, or his socialite companions on the other – Philinte, his wise but
somewhat complaisant friend, and the gossip-mongering Célimène, the woman with
whom Alceste claims to be in love. No matter how important Célimène’s role turns
out to be as the play progresses – paired with her cousin Éliante as the alternative
lover vengefully courted for a moment by Alceste – it is the opposition between the
two men that mostly divides the critics, so notoriously that it has even been taken
as an example of scholarly absurdities by Proust’s Albertine, as Norman Henfrey
finds important to note: if Alceste is seen as “a pure and truthful soul”, as Goethe
pronounced him, then Philinte becomes “the flatterer, a false-hearted man of the
world”, “the personification of egoism, craven compromise and self-satisfaction”; if,
on the other hand, Alceste is perceived as “sour tempered”, then Philinte becomes
the man to be preferred as a friend, or “the wise man whom one would do well to
strive to emulate, full of that breeding and discerning politeness found in the best
company” (160–161). That is also why the first scene of the comedy – the eloquent
confrontation of the raging Alceste and the composed Philinte, which is considered
to represent what Henfrey calls “the philosophical bone of contention worried over
by the two friends” (185) – has to this day fared as the scene that sets the tone for
the whole piece, so much so that the way any director or production crew decides to
interpret it often also provides the key to both the characterological and the generic
frame in which the whole performance is to be read and experienced.

Furthermore, it is precisely with this scene that Louis Jouvet, the legendary actor and
director of the early 20th-century French cartel of directors, begins his book Molière
et la comédie Classique (1965/2022), in which he bestows his lessons on acting: the
first chapter of the book is in fact entirely devoted to the first scene of Misanthrope,

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which, when performed, should in Jouvet’s view primarily not only establish the often
totally neglected, and yet pivotal and complex amicable, relationship between the two
men but also give space and breadth to the inexpressible and enigmatic aspect of the
two characters, which for him held equal importance for the play’s universe – Philinte
being, according to him, the more intelligent and more knowledgeable man in matters
of social intercourse, the one who exhibits protection of his friend, and Alceste being
more intrepid in his endeavours to bring his beloved woman back to her senses.
Jouvet famously insisted on actors simply enunciating the words in the right rhythm
and with the right respiration; he urged his students to let go of any preconceived
ideas of what the verses might mean and declared the following:
On ne sera jamais Alceste. Alceste est un personnage qui existe avant nous, et qui
existera après nous. A soixante-dix ans, quand tu seras un grand comédien et un grand
homme, car il faut être un grand homme pour jouer Alceste, tu joueras Alceste, mais tu
ne seras pas Alceste; tu mourras et Alceste vivra (18).
No one will ever be Alceste. Alceste is a character who existed before us and will exist
after we are long gone. At the age of seventy, when you shall become an actor of stature
and a man of stature, since one has to be a man of stature to play Alceste, you shall play
Alceste, but you shall not be Alceste: you shall die, and Alceste shall live.

Is, then, Alceste still alive? Has the comedy he dominates survived Jouvet himself? Are
we moderns capable of bypassing Rousseau’s dictum on the piece to rather recognise
in the protagonist what Hans Robert Jauss called “the paradox of the Misanthrope”,
that is, both his ridiculous and his subversive aspects? Jauss’s study is worth recalling
since he rightly points out the special case of the misanthrope as a character, the fact
that “to feel oneself the enemy of mankind would go against nature and the social
condition of human existence”, which means that a literary creation of such character
type represents “a limiting case created to test and explore what human nature is”,
and thus a chance for a contemporary critic to observe the very “changing horizons of
characterology” (307) which underpins comedy as a classical genre. This trajectory
leads the critic from classical anthropology, via the Christian conception of human
nature and its secularised, 19th- and 20th-century variants, to its contemporary
vicissitudes.

It is with this literary, anthropological, critical and, in Jouvet’s case, acting-pedagogic
background in mind that the French film director Phillipe le Guay and actor Fabrice
Lucchini – aged 72 – decided to envisage a sort of cinematic remake of Molière’s Le
Misanthrope which would primarily, as it appears from the plot, concentrate upon the
unlikely friendship of the two contrasting characters – the righteous, intransigent,
impatient, angry, jealous and self-obsessed loner, moralist and aesthete Alceste, on the
one hand, and the good-humoured, polite, confident, amused conversationalist and

somewhat cynical honnête homme, that is, typical French salonnier, Philinte, on the
other. Instead, however, of simply transposing Molière’s comedy into contemporary
ambience, dress and manners, which would require finding some justification for the
use of alexandrines – much more easily accepted as a convention when the play is
modernised on the stage – the authors made the two characters become contemporary
theatre, film and TV actors, Serge and Gauthier, not only displaying the same character
traits – Serge, played by Lucchini, as Alceste, and Gauthier, played by Laurent Wilson,
as Philinte – but also competing to interpret, in the theatre production mounted by
Gauthier, either the preeminent, colourful and contradictory Alceste, or the usually
bland and secondary Philinte, who may as a character appear to be as complex, and
fare much better in the society of Molière’s times, but is generally not perceived either
as an acting challenge or as a role that brings spotlight, whether on or off the stage.

The situation is all the more comic since the seemingly well-intentioned Gauthier,
whom we see to be a highly popular and well-paid actor in soap operas, is the one
who, eagerly wanting to finally interpret Alceste, besieges Serge, an experienced
theatre actor, to agree to play Philinte in his production. However, Serge voluntarily
retired some time ago from the acting profession and, disgusted by the entire cultural
industry, retreated, in a true Alcestian manner, to a kind of desert island, l’île de Ré,
where he lives in a destitute house, without enough money to pay even for the rotten
sewer pipes. Serge nevertheless plays hard to get, and Gauthier is forced to stay on the
island in order to win him over, initially agreeing that they alternate the roles, at least
while rehearsing, but finally suddenly deciding that he will be the one to play Alceste,
upon which decision, however, Serge falls in one of his typical tantrums, refuses the
deal and blunts to Gauthier’s wife that her husband cheated on her with the attractive
Italian Francesca, played by Maya Sansa, who also came to the island in need of
some peace after her divorce. One can recognise in her the contemporary variant of
Célimène, or should we say Éliante, since she forms the only actual erotic triangle
involving the two friends in the original Misanthrope. Although herself a moralist
much like Éliante, who also admires Alceste but finally marries Philinte, the freshly
divorced Francesca shares with Célimène her former marital experience, independent
spirit, aloofness and mystery, as well as the charm she has for Serge, who turns to be
somewhat clumsy and awkward in matters of love, not to speak of jealousy he feels for
Gauthier for his repeated love affairs and easy-going manners with women, besotted
as they all turn out to be by the latter’s fame and money.
Through its ironic metatheatrical redoubling of comic constellations inherited from
Molière, the plot thus redeploys the narcissistic subtext of the comedy diagnosed by
Lacan to be a kind of madness shared by the entire society and comically denied of
having been subjected to by the protagonist (173–176) – a madness only growing
in size and perniciousness in a neoliberal epoch and its “société du spectacle”, as

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French situationists would call it, much worse in that respect than the French 17thcentury aristocratic milieu. Besides featuring the aforementioned parallelisms in
the construction of the protagonist and his social interactions, as also in the meagre
plot that only serves to make the characters emerge as ridiculously self-centred, this
cinematic re-enactment of the Misanthrope’s entanglements, like the original, does
not refrain from farcical moments – sights of lascivious canvasses that Serge paints
in his hours of solitude, repeated falls of both friends’ into the river while riding old
timer bicycles, abrupt fights with annoying taxi-drivers, etc. Underneath, however, the
telling structural analogies and inversions with respect to the original comedy, the
film also hides a subtle melancholic undertone, whose effect cannot be reduced solely
to the fatal misunderstanding between Serge and his social environment, let alone to
his lost chances for renewed professional affirmation and emotional fulfilment.
The film’s somewhat smuggled topic concerns, namely, the issue of age, human age,
of course, and the age, the kind of epoch in which humans happen to be forced to
realise their humanity and “nature”. In the original Misanthrope, apart from preaching
ultimate sincerity in human relationships, Alceste also appears to be an inadvertent
laudator temporis acti: not only he rejects Oronte’s love sonnet by extolling the
worth and beauty of traditional folk poetry as a counterexample, but he also, as
we have already said, cultivates a misplaced perception of himself as a heroic and
tragic outcast from society – as a kind of archaic, Cornellian hero seeking spectacular
martyrdom, who then inevitably turns out to be grotesquely unfitting for the comedic,
primarily social and conversational context of a woman’s salon. However, Alceste’s
conservatism is all too often automatically linked to his supposed middle age, an
interpretive assumption fortified by critics’ knowledge that Molière was 44 when
he acted the role. Not all commentators, however, agree on that point: concurring in
this respect with Lionel Gossman, who also insists on Alceste’s paradoxical youth –
paradoxical since, as we heard, the protagonist in many respects occupies the comedic
“slot of the old man lusting after an inappropriate young woman” (Gossman 325) –
the Serbian theatre scholar Ivan Medenica – who, by the way, also sees Le Misanthrope
as a tragedy – argues that there are plenty of reasons indeed for assuming that Alceste
is very young, a man in his twenties, since he is courting a very young woman of the
same age, and, being free from any family or social obligations, is allowed to display
the kind of intolerant temperament which is entirely fitting for a young, impassioned
nature, prone to reject social hypocrisies, and apparently so different from Philinte in
behaviour only insofar the latter is more mature, and therefore also protective and
caring of his younger friend (67–92).
The situation in the film is, to a large extent, inverse: Serge and Gauthier seem to be
peers, but here Serge – the actor supposedly sharing Alceste’s nature – is the one who
looks older, resigned and resentful, while Gauthier in order to maintain his worldly

and professional success, does everything to look, dress and behave as someone
younger than his age. Gauthier’s aesthetics, moreover, mirrors his ethics: unlike Serge,
who patronises the soap opera actor on questions of diction and comprehension,
Gauthier does not care for Louis Jouvet’s famous lessons on the best way to play a
classical comedy, and especially Molière’s Misanthrope – all he cares for is to capitalise
on its canonicity and to reach a wider audience, or, as he professes, to “touch its heart”.
That issues of the actor’s age are a hidden line of interest in this film comedy is further
corroborated by two significant episodes: besides Francesca, in the village, there is a
young and sexy aspiring actress, Zoe, played by Laurie Bordesoules, who, however
prefers a more lucrative career of a pornographic star, although, when invited to
rehearse the role of Célimène with the two actors, she proves to be very talented,
eliciting in her companions both lust and sighs of admiration expressing anticipated
nostalgia for the talented youth so wasted. Moreover, when Serge one evening dances
with Francesca, irritated by Gauthier’s attempts at seducing her with his knowledge
of the Italian language, Francesca starts whispering in Serge’s ear the famous lines in
Dante’s Divine Comedy: Nel mezzo del cammin della mia vita, mi ritrovai in una selva
oscura … Serge is, however not in his thirties as Dante’s character is in the Divine
Comedy, but – even if one must admit that his retirement seems somewhat premature
– he certainly feels the selva oscura of death approaching.

Pretending that it is due to the feeling of betrayal by one of his previous best friends
and movie directors, who now sues him for having left the set before the film has
been finished – just like Alceste is sued in The Misanthrope, and just like Serge
himself is again running the risk to be sued by Gauthier – Serge, in fact, belies his
feelings of epochal maladjustment: during the rehearsals, he explodes over Gauthier’s
dependence upon the mobile phone calls, he is not able to understand the universal
irreverence when it comes to Molière’s and Jouvet’s legacy, and he is horrified by the
vacuity of soap operas through which Gauthier gained his popularity, not to speak
of the x-films which the young Zoe wants to star in. The use of classical comedy and
his acting expertise seem to him to be no longer valid and deservedly appreciated.
When he provocatively decides to come to Gauthier’s party dressed as a true 17thcentury nobleman, the anachronism is complete: infuriated by some bystanders who
entreat him to recite a couple of verses from the comedy in order to entertain them,
Serge provokes the final scandal before the entire crew of fellow actors, comforted in
finding the situation and the verses he so likes to be confirming the rigid view that he
had all along, since the beginning of the plot, of humanity irrevocably heading towards
not only a moral but also a cultural disaster. In a way, the end of the film does him
justice, for in the penultimate scene, we first see Gauthier playing Alceste to a rather
mediocre, anonymous actor as Philinte, and suddenly realising that he, Gauthier made
a mistake in diction which had been repeatedly pointed to him by Serge during their
rehearsals – a mistake that prevents him from continuing the performance. On the

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other hand, the very last scene that follows shows us Serge on a desert beach reciting
the same verses concerning the hatred of humanity with an expression of utter,
epiphanic, though also, of course, somewhat melancholic exhilaration on his face.

Despite its overall light atmosphere, which measuredly mixes the inserted recitations
of classical alexandrines with characteristic phrasings of contemporary dialogue, the
film thus manages to reinstate, if not further complicate, the paradox and ambiguity
of the original comedy, since here the melancholic protagonist not only takes himself
to be the sole guardian of the dying spirit of classical comedy but also insists that
its current devaluation is no laughing matter. To play with the notorious essay on
melancholy by Freud a bit, we might say that, just as Serge the actor incorporates
Molière’s comedy as the lost object of his desire and mourning and delights in ritually
evoking its verses even though there is no audience to watch him and listen to him,
so also the film incorporates substantial parts of The Misanthrope, running the same
risk as its protagonist, given that the release of the film has unfortunately been
accompanied by the same remarks regarding its own epochal maladjustment – the
supposed overblown allegiance to Molière that it displays, which might intimidate
modern viewers4.

The question remains: is the grande comédie, or the comedy of character, thereby
rejuvenated or a turn-off? Before we rush to proclaim the French 17th-century
“character comedy” to be anachronistic, we should perhaps lend our ears to recent
anamneses of the regulatory force with which the contemporary neoliberal capitalism
displays a certain “turn to the character”, as Kim Allen and Anna Bull recently called
its moral effects, an ideology, that is, imposing certain affective, cultural and psychic
features as the “right” kind of dispositions for surviving in society – confidence,
resilience and positive mental attitude, let alone, we could add, availability to constant
gregariousness and overall alertness in social networking – all qualities more
pertaining to youth and its promises, than to the old age. Any comedy attempting to
truly engage with this ideology inevitably faces the task of humorously exposing its
repressed content, namely, the resulting marginalisation of melancholic inadaptability
and ageing as such. Nevertheless, even if we accepted the strain, the genre thus
suffers, for its tradition is to celebrate youth and its victories over decrepit elders;
simply focusing on the maladjustment of ageing and wilfully solitary individuals in
contemporary neoliberal society hardly makes for a truly daring comedy challenging
the status quo. Having in mind the warnings that by referring to Molière’s Misanthrope,
the film itself runs the risk of alienating the modern audience, I will therefore suggest
that – to use the typology suggested by Alenka Zupančič, her opposition between
the truly disturbing “stand up” and the conformist, “sit down” comedy5 – the kind of

4 See the review by James Travers on http://www.frenchfilms.org/review/alceste-a-bicyclette-2013.html.

5 The lecture was delivered on 16 June 2019 at the European Graduate School, see https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=5DKsuU5T0qs.

“stand up” effect that Alceste à bicyclette performs has perhaps also a lot to do with the
current conundrum pertaining to cultural hierarchies and with the overall, academic
included, enthusiasm for all things popular, inevitably entailing the supposed
anachronism of the very classical comedy that both ridiculed a melancholic stance
and, by making it subversive of any kind of institutional repression, consecrated
its provocative potential in the first place. The invocation of the Misanthrope thus
reinstates the crisis of moral and aesthetic judgement that once upon a time made it
so modern, and that made any taking sides with the characters uneasy, a challenge to
choose the kind of cultural capital one would like to be associated with – and, upon
choosing, the kind of social risk to be exposed to. In the case of Alceste à bicyclette,
it is therefore up to us to decide whether we prefer to be denounced as a stubborn,
conservative, narrow-minded and inflexible classicist or as a calculating, fashiondriven liberal if not pseudo-leftist populist. Now if such troubling of the high-minded
audience is not the true calling of a high comedy, I do not know what is.

39

40

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