Harry Cleven’s Les Héritières (2008): King Lear in prime-time Corsica

Résumé En

When French television viewers settled down at prime time on Boxing Day 2009 to watch part 1 of Harry Cleven’s Les Héritières [The Heiresses], they knew they were going to watch a cast led by one of their favourite actors, Jacques Weber, known for his energy and physical acting on stage and screen. They had gathered from their television programme – and this was confirmed from the opening shots – that the two-part film was set in Corsica, in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. What they were unaware of was that they were going to watch a melodrama closely fashioned on Shakespeare’s King Lear. This essay examines Cleven’s adaptation against French television’s prior engagements with King Lear and the cultural agenda of France's public service channels. While the title – and the framing of the film – invite the audience to focus on the three daughters, their father, an overbearing landowning patriarch is a central, powerful figure. The period, World War Two, resembles Shakespeare’s depiction of a world torn apart from within while submitted to external pressures and the Corsican setting provides an ambience as powerful as the heath and cliffs. My contention is that, in rescripting one of the world’s most powerful (and certainly best-known) tragedies of disrupted family loyalties into a melodrama for household audiences, and anchoring it in an environment that is both identifiable and ‘other’, Cleven seeks to reconcile French public television’s tradition of quality entertainment with its need to respond to the competition of popular series that draw on family sagas and locations in telegenic, culturally significant regional environments. Turning to Shakespeare without saying so may be a way not to deter audiences: but the title also implies a shifting of the balance onto the next generation, in a process of rejuvenation through adaptation, and a widening of reception, an opening onto a present where Shakespearian drama remains relevant even when, paradoxically, it is not directly acknowledged