"Impromptu"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

     Amandine Lucille Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant is better
known as George Sand, the novelist whose unconventional behavior
scandalized 19th C. France.  She divorced her husband, had love
affairs with numerous men, dressed in men's clothing, and supported
herself and her children as an independent woman.  Common behaviors
in our day, uncommon, to say the least in the 1830s and '40s.
Among the men George Sand loved was the Polish pianist and composer
Frederic Chopin, and their romantic attachment has already been
subjected to a Hollywood treatment in the 1945 film "A Song to
Remember" starring Cornel Wilde and Merle Oberon.  Now another
group of filmmakers including director James Lapine and
screenwriter Suzanne Kernochan, have taken this as their subject in
a new film, entitled "Impromptu."  It is as light, airy, and tinged
with tartness as a lemon souffle, and just as delicious.

      What I like best about this film is that while it is about
famous people--not just Sand and Chopin but also Franz Liszt,
Alfred de Musset, and Eugene Delacroix figure prominently here--it
doesn't take them too seriously. In fact it treats their comings
and goings and intrigues as French farce, and the result is a
delightful comedy instead of a pious Hollywood film biography.

    George Sand was the daughter of a nobleman who married a
commoner, a dancer.  The film starts with a scene from her
childhood, running alone in the woods and performing a religious
ritual to a deity of her own devising--revealing her to have a
singular nature which insists on going its own way, a trait that is
even more pronounced in her adult life.

    The centerpiece of the film is what happens when a slightly
silly young noblewoman who lives in the country with an old
philistine of a husband and who is entranced with art and artists
invites a whole group of them to come and stay and work at her home
for two weeks.  Because she knows Chopin is coming and because she
has fallen in love with his sublime music, George Sand invites
herself along, even though her ex-lover De Musset will be there.
Franz Liszt is there too, with his noblewoman mistress who is
jealous of George Sand and who has designs on Chopin herself.  Then
George's immediate past lover, who is still the tutor to her
children, arrives in a jealous rage and the plot complications
thicken even more.  I should know better than to try to give a plot
summary of a French farce.  Suffice to say there is a lot of
romantic plotting, a lot of deception and misunderstanding and
everything works out o.k. in the end, and it's a lot of fun along
the way.

    The cast is uniformly good starting with Australian actress
Judy Davis as George Sand, Hugh Grant as Chopin, Bernadette Peters
as Liszt's petulant and unhappy, perpetually pregnant mistress, and
Mandy Patinkin as the drunken, torch-carrying de Musset.  A number
of these people have worked with director Lapine before and they
play together comfortably and with obvious pleasure, like a good
repertory company.  Filmed in France, it has the feel and look of
a French art film, though the actors and director are mainly
Americans.

     This isn't exactly what I'd call a feminist film.  For one
thing there is a problematic scene in which Delacroix attempts to
rape his hostess, and the only reason it isn't a rape is that when
she stops resisting and becomes more sexually aggressive than he
is.  It's meant to be funny, but it's not the kind of "humor" that
will sit well with feminists.  On the other hand, the film has some
redeeming feminist aspects such as the obvious fun it pokes at
masculine vanity and ideas of "honor."  There is not one but two--
count 'em--duels fought over George Sand, and when a macho duelist
tells George that "women like this sort of thing," she looks at
him like he's from Mars and says, "Are you crazy?" In this film
it's not the macho guy who gets the woman, it's sweet, frail,
sensitive, sickly Chopin who gets her, and that's a plus.  And,
most importantly, George herself is a model for an independent
woman with her strength and determination and willingness to own
her own feelings and take care of her own needs in her own way.  I
liked Impromptu enough to see it a second time, and I recommend it to
you.