On the day we observe Frederic Chopin’s birthday, has anyone else seen “Impromptu” (1991)?
Judy Davis, at her most flamboyant, plays the cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing George Sand, who scrawls by candlelight thinly-veiled fictions about her own ardent and often scandalous love affairs, while in an adjacent chamber, a young Hugh Grant, as the consumptive Chopin, improvises morbid piano fantasies.
The supporting parts are heavy with historical figures of bohemian Paris: Julian Sands as Liszt, Mandy Patinkin as Alfred de Musset, Bernadette Peters as Liszt’s mistress, Marie d’Agoult, Ralph Brown as Delacroix, and Emma Thompson as the would-be socialite who naively offers them her house.
This is the Romantic movement as farce, a feature-length “Frasier” episode by way of Merchant-Ivory, or perhaps “Smiles of a Summer Night” as dreamt by Bob Hope. The director is frequent Sondheim collaborator James Lapine.
If you’re searching for a profound experience, this most certainly is not it. But if you’ve a hankering for classical music junk food, you’ve come to the right place. Is it historically accurate? I wouldn’t recommend it as the basis for any term papers. But if you liked Thompson’s “Sense and Sensibility,” the Branagh version of “Much Ado About Nothing,” or “Amadeus,” definitely check it out. If it doesn’t put a smile on your face, you’re too grumpy for me. And I would say that’s saying something.
