Beyond the Multiplex

Bastille Day bonanza: Three big French films worth your attention -- one starring Deneuve and Depardieu! Plus: Mamet at his most disturbing.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, David Mamet, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

"Gabrielle"

July 13, 2006 | Sacre bleu! It's the Francophile egghead logjam! Some version of this pileup occurs every Bastille Day, but this year it's ludicrous: We've got new features from three of France's most important directors, all opening in the United States on the same day. All they need now is a unified marketing campaign that somehow references the Zidane head-butt.

If you ever pause to wonder what has become of the audience for foreign-language films in our fine land, pass some of the blame along to the brilliant distributors who pull stunts like this. Yes, there will be articles like mine discussing this veritable feast of bittersweet Gallic savories, but the reality is that the already modest big-city audience for these movies will be carved into pieces, if not driven away altogether in confusion. None of these three pictures will get the opening weekend it deserves, making exhibitors in smaller cities understandably hesitant to give them a chance. So let's drag out the current mantra of the indie-film business: Oh well, there's always Netflix.

When I told director Patrice Chéreau that his challenging new marriage drama "Gabrielle" wasn't likely to attract a large audience, he received the news with a smile. "I don't need a big audience," he said. "I want a small audience, but a good one." Chéreau has had a major international hit with the early-'90s costume drama "Queen Margot," and a succè de scandale in 2001 with the intensely erotic "Intimacy." With a self-consciously difficult film like "Gabrielle" he's upping the ante, as if making a play for the vacant throne of Greatest European Director. Like most other Continental titles, that isn't quite the honor it used to be; the throne is a bit moth-eaten these days and looks more like an old chair in a closet of memories. But still.

André Téchiné's "Changing Times" looks to the past in quite another way. Film buffs will mostly want to see this sweet if jumbled melodrama of lost love because it reunites Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, who haven't acted together in a quarter century. A generation younger than Téchiné and Chéreau, the prolific François Ozon has turned out perhaps his finest and most intimate work so far, "Time to Leave," which follows the final days of a handsome but not exceptionally likable young man with a terminal illness.

All this exquisite Frenchness won't quite overshadow Stuart Gordon's devastating film version of David Mamet's play "Edmond," which has become one of the summer's most buzzed-over micro-indies. And we'll save a thought for "Excellent Cadavers," Marco Turco's documentary about the recent history of the Sicilian Mafia, which essentially indicts the entire postwar Italian state, up to and including Silvio Berlusconi, for tolerating (if not kissy-facing) the world's most notorious criminal gang.

"Gabrielle": A marriage, and a film, with dangerously jagged edges
Anybody who wanders into "Gabrielle" expecting a good date flick, complete with period costumes, beautiful sets and heaving bosoms, is likely to leave the theater enraged. Based on Joseph Conrad's short story "The Return," Patrice Chéreau's film follows the comfortable, upper-bourgeois marriage of Jean (Pascal Greggory) and Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert), sometime around 1910 in an unidentified French city, as it is torn apart by a sudden, impetuous decision.

None of this is especially hard to follow: Jean comes home from a train journey to find a letter from Gabrielle, saying she is leaving with another man. Just as quickly, she comes back. He berates and humiliates her, and she responds in kind. Not yet ready to end the interlocking business relationship that is their marriage, the two wage open warfare, in front of the servants and the invited guests at their weekly salon. One of those guests, in fact, is the fleshy, dissipated newspaper editor who works for Jean, and whom Gabrielle now loves (even though she didn't stay with him).

It's Chéreau's method for telling this story that will delight some viewers and infuriate others. Throughout "Gabrielle," he tries to stretch the cinematic medium to the breaking point. The film hopscotches between black-and-white and color sequences, without any obvious system. Patches of the film are silent, with huge, intrusive intertitles to convey information and even lines of dialogue. As Chéreau admits, the editing deliberately violates the established grammar of cinema, so that the camera seems to skip around the couple's opulent rooms, and we sometimes see events happen more than once from different points of view. (The terrific cinematography is by Eric Gautier, who shot "Kings and Queen" and "The Motorcycle Diaries," among many other films.)

Instead of the restrained chamber-music score you might expect, Chéreau uses lyrical but defiantly modernist, even discordant, music by Italian composer Fabio Vacchi. Clearly, the idea is to wrest this apparently repressed and antique tale of adultery in a bygone era out of its preconceived niche and render it as a disturbing, timeless fable of human torment. I found it a haunting and riveting work, unlike anything else you can see at the movies and as such an explicit challenge to the unambitious, anesthetic character of most contemporary cinema. But is it easy, or delightful, or fun? It is not.

Next page: "A story about a man and a woman"