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2009 Festival Feature Films (March 27-29)

French director Gérard Krawczyk and actress Josiane Balasko present the United States premiere of L’Auberge rouge

director Gérard Krawczyk screenplay Christian Clavier and Michel Delgado producer Hervé Truffaut starring Josiane Balasko, Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot, Jean Baptiste Maunier, Sylvie Joly, Anne Girouard, François-Xavier Demaison, Frédéric Epaud, Juliette Lamboley, Urbain Cancelier, Laurent Gamelon, Olivier Saladin, Jean-Christophe Bouvet, Igor Skreblin, Christian Bujeau, Jan Roulier running time 1 h 35 min general audience

Synopsis

In the late 19th century, the bleak Crouteux Inn stands in the middle of the wild mountains of the Pyrenees. Martin and Rose, a couple of innkeepers, run the establishment and regularly get Violet, their deaf and mute adopted son, to murder solitary travelers in order to rob them. One stormy night, good Father Carnus in charge of taking a young man to a remote monastery nested in the mountains, is led to take refuge at the inn. …

director/screenwriter
Gérard Krawczyk

actress/director
Josiane Balasko

theater

bibliography

actor
Gérard Jugnot

actor
Christian Clavier

An incredible short-news item

Yes, The Red Inn is the remake of Claude Autant-Lara’s eponymous film which came out in 1951, itself inspired by an authentic and horrible event that occurred in Ardèche in 1833. Pierre and Marie Martin, two former tenants who became owners of the Peyrebeille Inn, were found guilty of having murdered and robbed two travelers who had the misfortune to come knocking at their door. They would be decapitated in the courtyard of their establishment, in front of a crowd of almost 30,000 people. Before inspiring Claude Autant-Lara and now Gerard Krawczyk, the affair was also the source of a silent film made by Jean Epstein in 1923! Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed.

“I consider myself more as a transporter of stories,” adds the filmmaker Gerard Krawczyk. “I make a new generation discover a rereading of a story.”

Appealing monsters and insufferable victims

If Autant-Lara’s film revealed a frank anticlerical tone, this one chimes more distinctly on the side of comedy. A social comedy, one could say, the film is set in 1830, during the Restoration. “A period where the social relations between the bourgeois, nobles and servants are disastrous,” observes Gerard Krawczyk. “The travelers who come into the inn are aristocrats and they are very infatuated with themselves, very contemptuous of ‘lower-class France.’” At the end of the day, the innkeeper assassins are distinctly more likable than the people that they decide to eliminate. “No one is absolving them of their acts,” says Christian Clavier. “Rose, Martin and their children, Mathilde and Violet, are scoundrels, but endearing scoundrels. We love them because they form a united, loving family. In all proportions, it’s a bit like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: the characters behave sometimes in an appalling manner, but they are part of a larger scheme.”