Please note: Molière will be repeated Saturday, July 27.

Ariane Mnouchkine, the celebrated modern French theater director, brings the biography of the legendary French playwright Molière (1622-1673) to vibrant life in this unusual historical epic. Like Mnouchkine's own plays this film throbs with ritual, music and costume; her vision of France during the Regency and the early reign of Louis XIV is an elaborate tapestry of pageantry and poverty. Molière, played by Philippe Caubere, is portrayed as a passionate wit whose hatred of hypocrisy led him by the age of 20 to create a theater troupe devoted to stripping the emperor of his clothes. Part One of the over-four-hour film is devoted to the childhood of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, the upholsterer's son who was to break with his bourgeois background and take to the roads as Molière. Part Two follows the picaresque exploits of Molière and his troupe as they wend their way through poverty-stricken France, and his rise to eminence within the elite he so loved to hate.