Watching the trailer for I've Loved You So Long you could be forgiven for thinking that it's just another French arthouse offering - the scale resolutely human, the plot driven by relationships, secrets, complicated desires, all treated with utmost seriousness. It's the genre the French are most comfortable with (having seen what passes for a French action movie/historical drama in Female Agents, I can see why) and in many ways, it's a necessary antidote to Hollywood gigantism and English silliness. But, at the same time, there's a feeling that you've seen about 100 of these kinds of films before, most of them starring Juliette Binoche.
I've Loved You So Long only partly transcends that cliché. Perhaps its attempt to explore a serious moral problem sets it out from other, similar films - but there's a lot in the way that the story is told which leaves you with a sense of, well, déjà vu.
The film opens with a morose, tired-looking Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) chain-smoking in an airport café. We don't know if she has just arrived or is waiting to depart, but then a woman, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), appears and they go off together, almost without a word. Léa drops the spectacularly unenthusiastic Juliette at her home, then goes to pick up her girls from school, leaving her guest to wander around the house, alone except for a mute old man in the study.
This quietly baffling opening is an effective attention-grabber, and is used to full advantage by novelist and first-time director Phillipe Claudel. Only gradually does it become clear that Juliette hides some kind of terrible secret. She is Léa's sister, but she has been away for 15 years - "on a long journey", as she tells Léa's inquisitive adopted daughter, Clélis, over an awkward evening meal.
In fact, she's been in prison. She is seeing a social worker, to help her find a job, and has to report to the local police station once every two weeks. At this point what everyone watching wants to know is exactly what she did. When we finally get an answer - Juliette blurts it out in front of a pushy factory boss during an interview - it both ups the stakes and raises a host of new questions.
The plot revolves around Scott Thomas and Zylberstein's characters, and they both deliver fine performances.
If Juliette's blank demeanour is a bit wearisome at first, it seems justified once we find out more about what's happened to her. As the weeks and months go by, Scott Thomas handles the emergence of a more relaxed, carefree character well, and the final catharsis is extremely moving.
Zylberstein has the right combination of resolve and fragility as Léa, who is described by director Claudel as being stuck in adolescence (the age at which Juliette was taken from her). There's one particularly touching moment when Léa struggles to remember her older sister taking her for tea and cakes after her ballet class, though it must have happened almost every week. Léa suddenly and painfully realises the extent to which her parents, who disowned Juliette, were able to wash the memories of her older sister away.
Around the women flit a number of supporting characters, most of them men: Léa's sceptical husband Michel (Serge Hazanavicius), that mute grandfather (a schmaltzy, superfluous character, played by Jean Claude-Arnaud), and Juliette's two love interests, Léa's colleague Michel (Laurent Grevill) and the policeman, Captain Fauré (Frédéric Pierrot).
Pierrot in particular is beautifully warm and sympathetic as the lonely officer to whom Juliette has to report each fortnight, though behind the compassion lies his own personal tragedy. He's the first, apart from Léa, to treat her as a human being, something all the more significant because he knows exactly what she has done.
And what has she done, exactly, and why? Claudel keeps us guessing until the end, when a chance discovery clears the way for the last stage of Juliette's rehabilitation.
It's this neatness that makes this film less memorable than, say, Michael Haneke's Hidden, which was a story without a denouement.
It's perhaps a bit cowardly of Claudel to fulfil our hopes - that Juliette is not, in fact, a monster, that her crime was a crime on paper only - so directly. It would have been braver to meet our prejudices head on, to wonder about the possibility of redemption even after an act of true evil.
No matter. Even with this slight failure of nerve, I've Loved You So Long is an intriguing, affecting film, not without its melodramatic flourishes, but certainly a cut above. |
