La vie promise

`La Vie promise' is the sad, meandering and stillborn tale of a streetwalker with a shattered brain who, in a moment of danger, flees from Nice into the country and tries in vain to return to an old lover and child and time when the life`promised' her had been much rosier. This is very far from being Isabelle Huppert's best work, simply because the journey chronicled in `La Vie Promise' is lacking in coherence and momentum. Huppert is always impressive, but the movie just isn't up to her remarkable talents and can't adequately display them. One can only assume she took on the role of Sylvia because it seemed a challenge to become a rough whore with bad hair. Her presence never ceases to be arresting, her face a glorious tacky ruin framed by bleach blond strands, white lipstick, and desperate blank stare. There are moments when one can enjoy just looking into those cold, beautiful eyes. But time passes slowly.

It's not that the other principals aren't both good. They're Maud Forget as Laurence, Sylvia's older daughter, who accompanies her – sporadically: they keep abandoning each other and then in far fetched coincidences re-connecting -- on the voyage back in search of the lost life, and Pascal Greggory as Joshua, a mysterious man with a prison past and a car theft present (why does he seem so sensitive and nice?) who chooses to accompany the two women and be their driver. Joshua too goes off, but then comes back to drive them again at the end. This is the movie's signature move: dump people, then pick them up again – if you can. There's not much hope and ultimately not much point to these people's desperate lives. The patchy, disorganized plot repeatedly destroys the energy and emotion the scenes between Sylvia, Laurence, Joshua, et al. have built up. This is a clumsily assembled story that no amount of emoting can save.

Surely the challenge for Huppert was to enter a rougher world than usual and cast off her usual hauteur and elegance, and in the early scenes indeed she's barely recognizable. But as time wears on the imperious gestures return and Huppert is Huppert again; the smallest details like the way she holds a cigarette become glamorous and confident, as in other roles – even as her character loses energy and hope and the `promise' of arriving at some kind of powerful finale gradually fades. The movie, like Huppert's mask as the damaged, desperate Sylvia, also deconstructs, because its emotional climax – the scene when Sylvia at last finds Piotr (André Marcon), the man who once loved her but now is raising their eight-year-old son with a new wife, is just a sad little moment that sits ill with the Hallmark card, David Hamilton soft focus and flower images that have characterized most of the outdoor scenery.

The irrelevant prettiness of these flower moments is as grating as the corny American songs that are periodically interjected to crudely underline some plot point. But what point? We get that Laurence has some kind of illness, but is it chronic indigestion or epilepsy? Sylvia turns out to have spent time in a sanitorium, and so we gather that she's brain damaged, which makes recognition scenes pretty much non-starters. What's wrong with her, and why she can't remember former neighbors and other people in her old life but knows Piotr and instantly bonds with the son she hasn't seen since he was two, are not questions M. Dahan is able to answer for us. Somehow the lack of a back-story doesn't make a story.

Isabelle Huppert gives a superb performance as a pill-popping prostitute in "La Vie Promise," a slice-of-life, hard luck tale set on the highways and byways of rural France. Huppert is Sylvia, a hooker in Nice with a fourteen year old daughter named Laurence, whose existence the jaded streetwalker would prefer not to acknowledge even though Sylvia does give her money on a regular basis. One night, however, Laurence forces herself into her mother's life by stabbing to death the pimp who is thrashing Sylvia to within an inch of her life for some money she owes him. The two women hop aboard a train in an effort to disappear into the countryside. One night, Laurence runs away after the two of them have an argument. Much of the film's time is devoted to the mother and daughter's search for one another, often missing each other by a mere fraction of a second. Joshua is a man whom Sylvia and Laurence meet separately on the road and who, in his strangely quiet way, becomes instrumental in reconciling - both physically and psychologically - the estranged pair.

"La Vie Promise" has a simplicity of style and a purity of vision that keep it from becoming just another tale of a down-and-out prostitute or a tired generation gap drama. Sylvia is a complex character, a hurt and lost soul trying to come to grips with the mistakes she's made and hoping to rectify at least some of those mistakes in this crucial moment of her life. Huppert does a beautiful job conveying both the emotional turmoil and the latent nobility hidden within the recesses of her wounded psyche. The screenplay doesn't try to psychoanalyze the character completely, but allows her to retain much of the mystery and ambiguity that makes her, finally, interesting to the audience. The film does less well with Laurence who really isn't allowed a whole lot of psychological development throughout the story. As a result, young Maud Forget isn't given much opportunity to display her depth and scope as an actress. Pascal Greggory's Joshua is also kept enigmatic, but in his case the ambiguity works well in the context of the story.

The film has been beautifully photographed, and Oliver Dahan's direction contains many lyrical touches that turn the film into a compelling mood piece, employing nature as a prime element in its artistry. But it is Huppert's rich and many-layered performance that brings the film to life.

Isabelle Huppert's character is neither brain-damaged nor schizophrenic. She suffers from what the DSM IV terms "dissociative amnesia". Some people just call it dissociation. The popular term for this phenomenon is repressed memories; however, professionals no longer use that term because it is inaccurate and fraught with misperceptions.

My interpretation of this character's history is this: At some point in her past, before she married her husband and had children, she experienced something which was so traumatic, terrifying, and threatening to her sense of safety and existence,that she had to lose awareness of it in order to not lose her mind. She had a breakdown later on and entered the psychiatric hospital. She got married and things were going okay for awhile but then something triggered the old trauma and she became dissociative again. She left her husband, started a new life and "forgot" all about her old life. She became emotionally shut down and empty because at this point she only functioned with a small amount of her emotional make-up. She had to shut the rest of it down because it contained knowledge that was too threatening for her to know about.

Then she has to run away because of the murder and she re-reads the letters from her ex-husband and slowly starts regaining awareness of that part of her life. However, she still can't remember the original trauma that caused all her problems. When she arrives back at the old house, images and impressions of her life there flood through her mind as if from a dream. This is what memories lost through dissociation are like when they come back. The director evoked this experience pretty accurately. I wanted to tell friends that if they want to see what it's like to remember things that one has lost through dissociation, to see this movie.

She lost the memory of her husband and her life with him because in some way that experience connected to the earlier, unbearable trauma.

She goes back to the psychiatric hospital because she wants to know about her past. She wants to know what happened during her marriage and also what the original trauma was.

I am not pulling this out of the air. For someone knowledgeable about dissociative amnesia, the clues in the movie are obvious.

For one thing, the husband refers in his letter to "that old trouble", or something like that. He says something like, "I know how fragile you are, but I thought that old trouble was behind you..." I can't remember exactly what he says. As I understood it, he was referring to trouble caused by traumatic experiences early in her life. Others may believe he's talking about mental illness such as schizophrenia, but they are incorrect. I'd have to see the film again to argue this point more effectively. However, there's too much else in this movie that makes it clear her problem is dissociation, not schizophrenia.

I can make this case with confidence because this character's story mirrors my own in many ways. The idea that a person can forget events central to her life because they call up old emotions and traumas, which she needed to block out, is not far-fetched. It happened to me. I did forget a significant person, as well as the events and emotions connected with him. I did read his letters years later, and when I did, I started to remember our relationship of 27 years previously. I did find him and after I did, I gradually remembered most of what our relationship had been and who he was. When I called him out of the blue, he told me he had been in love with me all his life. He had never married. Now, he has moved on, after we talked at length about what had happened and I explained to him why I had broken up with him in the terrible way that I did.

When I remembered the relationship I'd had with him, all the emotions connected with it felt as if they'd happened last week, not 27 years ago.

I too have been wanting to remember the details of the original trauma. I had started remembering it before I remembered the old boyfriend. A lot of it has come back, but not all. I think that Isabelle's character probably did get at least some of the answers she was looking for. The fact that the audience didn't get these answers only means that the specific reason she dissociated in the first place is not the most important part of the story.

What's important is the story that came after -- how it affected her and her family, what they all lost, and how she recovered her full self.

It's also about how people need love to heal and how love enables us to heal each other.

"La Vie Promise" ("The Promised Life") is among the French actress' Isabelle Huppert's finest accomplishments. This amazing masterpiece presents Huppert in a character, which is a combination abrasiveness and vulnerability, she is both exasperating and at the same time pathetic, monstrous, and saintly. It is difficult to envision another actress who could embrace the complexity of her character and yet still present her persona in such an intriguing paradigm of humanity who magically captures our full attention while taking our breath away.

It seems palpably unfair when such other female film stars as Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, or Renee Zellweger win Academy Awards, whereas Isabelle Huppert has never been nominated for an Oscar. Over the last thirty years, this effervescent French actress has put forth a series of remarkable performances, capturing every aspects of the human experience with style and panache. Check out her brilliant performances in "Madame Bovary," `Merci pour le Chocolat' and "The Piano Player" or the delightful weirdness of "8 Women'.

Huppert's role is that of Sylvia, a sullen prostitute walking the streets of Nice in France, seemingly frozen in time with an obsolete sense of her rebellious prerogative. When the cameras dolly in for a close-up, her heavy cosmetic attempt to preserve the illusion of youth reveal their exercise in futility. Her brittle, oftentimes hostile attitude is typical of what one would expect of a seasoned hooker.

Sylvia seems in charge of her life until the appearance of her 14-year-old epileptic daughter Laurence (Maud Forget). Laurence is in foster care and Sylvia would prefer to have her out of her life, which becomes obvious by her callous rejection and disrespect even though it was Laurence's birthday. Laurence, desperate for attention, turns up again unexpectedly in Sylvia's apartment and observes her mother's pimp pummeling her. When the pimp's associate turns his attention to Laurence by sexually attacking her, she fatally stabs him, thus compelling mother and daughter to hastily leave town.

Eight years earlier, Sylvia had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized after giving birth to a son. The boy's father (whether he was married to her or not is not clear) lived in the north of France. Out of some sort of mysterious compulsion, she and Laurence journey North, traveling by train, on foot and hitching rides with strangers; in order to seek out her long abandoned son and his father, who represent perhaps a new beginning or sanctuary. It is on this journey that mother and daughter begin to experience each other as the seeds of love kindle what had been lost over the harsh years. While hitchhiking they encounter Joshua, (Pascal Greggory), a car thief and escaped convict who has taken an interest in the well being of Sylvia and Laurence and ultimately takes the time to bring them to their final destination.

The film has the inspiring appeal of a half-told chronicle where significant and intriguing passages are casually left unexplained. The full meaning and resolution of Sylvia's relationship with Laurence and Joshua's criminal career remain delightfully obscured; leaving us just enough information to maintain our interest, yet preserving the mystery that tweaks our attention. The audience must search their own repertoires of imaginations to conclude the story.

Director Olivier Dahan is daring enough to bring his camera into tight close-ups leaving Huppert's character displayed in unflattering poses while wearing harsh make-up and in poor lighting. Huppert does not attempt hide behind the cheap make-up in order to present a good performance. Her talent is sufficiently powerful to reveal Sylvia's inner strength and bring her true character bubbling to the surface. Her painted exterior suggests one stereotype while her eyes tell yet another story. This is an extraordinary film not to be missed.

This movie is held upright by the acting work of the main characters. Especially Isabelle Huppert exceeds herself once again, in portraying a weird persona , not the first time she achieved this. She is unsurpassable in acting out emotional developments within a story. Her meeting with her small son, she did not see for years, towards the end of the story, is gripping. It is not often cinema brings tears to me... Pascal Gregory is better than many middle of the road Hollywood actors, we see every night on TV (commercial TV in Holland at least). Our minds having been spoiled by too many cheap US products, thanks to TV, this French film is refreshing in its camera shooting. After so many road movies in the US Far West, who would believe similar shots may be made in the French "corn deserts" north of Paris? (Just get off, anywhere, from the A-1 auto route, between Paris and Lille, and see what I mean). Once again good use is made of the French richness in "patrimoine', meaning old village locations, and, as a peak, the old country farm house, the main character grew up in. What a great ruin, an ideal Parisians holiday home!! The weak points, I think at least, are mainly in the script, and casting. Sylvia's daughter, is partly miscasted, as she is the opposite to Sylvia, in looks and character. The storyline resembles a cheap love-novel sometimes, in its sentimentality. Nevertheless, a fine example of French "authors'" film making, in a natural style only the French can make.