A day at the Louvre brings Carl and Claudie closer they share with each other their secret artistic products: Carl recites his poetry (about Claudie) and Claudie shows him her novel about a pregnant Joan of Arc. The next morning brings Claudie’s neighbor, a funky American cellist played by a raucous glee by Robin Weigert. Sex is a complicated need – Claudie is driven by a broken heart caused by a quarrel with her married lover, and Carl is at the mercy of his age and inexperience and his crush on Claudie. Claudie makes up the couch, but is soon dragging out her Kama Sutra, which predictably leads to sex. Claudie is willing to share her painting books and to explain how she learned about the painter Bonnard through being in love.Īfter telephoning home, Carl receives permission to stay with Claudie and her mythical husband.
In this taut space, and under the perfect direction of Nelson himself, evolves the complex drama of culture and love and sex.Ĭarl is an avid learner: He wants to be able to read Racine and Proust. This apartment, with its couch and records and books and recessed bed, is a miraculous evocation of that magical period by Thomas Lynch.
Through lingering in the bathroom of her apartment, Carl has managed to be the last student left in chez Claudie. One night, she takes her students to a film club (they often see exciting new French films, though tonight they’ve seen something about surfers that Carl didn’t like). She was forced by the school to call herself “Madame” Melville, although she’s not married. Carl is enrolled at the American school where his lit teacher is Claudie Melville, played with a lithe sense of a young Frenchwoman of the period by Joely Richardson. It is this doubleness – the wisdom of later years and the eager but stiff and formal readiness of youth – that Culkin embodies with remarkable poetry.Ĭulkin is Carl – his father was, in 1966, an American businessman in Paris. He plays, as well, the young man of 15 having the erotic enchantment, the opening to life that is the substance of the drama. MACAULAY Culkin turns out to be quite the actor.He plays, in Richard Nelson’s memory play “Madame Melville,” a man of 30 looking back, with affection and amusement, on a memorable experience in the heady Paris of 1966, when he was 15.
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