La fidélité

La Fidelité (2000)

Andrzej Zulawski has an obsession : Passion for understand love and how feeling could affect everything beyond reason. Clélia (Sophie Marceau), is a very attractive photographer that start a new job in a sensationalistic newspaper. This is the gate in which she is going to know three men : Cléve ( Pascal Geggory) a middle age books editor, that will become her husband ; Nemo (Gillaume Canet) also a photographer with a very intriguing life; and the owner of the broadcasting and tabloid company, Rupert McRoi ( Michel Subor), that by the way could be her real Dad. But Fidelity isn't a soap opera, and thing are more complicated in Zulawski's movies. . The Fidelity, is about different things: principles and fidelity, beyond passion, and how a bisexual husband do not believe the sincerity of his wife. Is also about the paparazzi's underworld, and how our life is directed by our feelings.

This subject was the them of Possession (1981), in which other lovely woman, Isabelle Adjani, is trapped between the tentacles of a "Thing", that could be the irrationality of passions. La Fidelité is full of different characters, that are interconnected with the invisible net of feeling and passion. The young girl enters in a few time in a chaotic experiences as well as the hypocrisy of some of the people that surround her and the photography became a tool for to understand, by the way, the film is also full of gorgeous photos and a blink to Andy Warhol, which picture is showed somewhere in the film.

This is a movie that should have been a mini-series as it tries to get too much information in too small a space. The whole story is constantly being bombarded with sub-plots, character introduction and meaningless pieces information that go nowhere. There is a underlying plot where boy meets a girl, she has doubts but gets married anyhow and then her doubts surface and she goes to see if they are real. They turn out not to be but her husband won't believe that she was not unfaithful and her almost boyfriend doesn't want her as she was not unfaithful to her husband. With that said there are no less than 1000 sub-plots and character introductions that make this plot almost incomprehensible. In the first 15 minutes you are inundated with so many things and situations that you just stop caring. You don't care about any of the confused and screwed up cast that drifts in and out of the story like vultures feeding on a corpse. Each one comes in and takes some interest away from the viewer. After a half-hour, and completely disinterested, I stayed and watched the remaining two and a half hours out of pure morbid curiosity. I couldn't imagine where it was going but like staring at a fire I just couldn't get up and turn it off. The production values are superb but the resulting movie is a waste of time; wash your socks instead.

Intriguing that Sophie Marceau should make a film about fidelity under the direction of Zulawski (" Crazy love* "), her companion for more than fifteen years. But this is just one aspect of a baroque and flamboyant film which evokes the gutter press and organ trafficking to bring up to date a literary classic, "The princess of Cleves ". Torn between her oath not to deceive her husband and her desire for a suicidal young photographer, Sophie Marceau finds herself in one of her best roles.

* with Sophie Marceau, Francis Huster and Tcheky Karyo.

Aesthetic, as the Youth would say. But also useless and campy but not necessarily in the good way.

Another film based upon ' La Princesse de Cleves ' ( the version by Christophe Honore is the best ) and it is one of the more watchable of Zulawski's output. Sophie Marceau gives a decent performance but no more than that, and the other actors who stand out are Edith Scob and the incredibly good Magali Noel. For those who do not know them look them up!! The male actors are passable so really the full weight of the film depends more or less on the direction. I cannot say I am a great fan of Zulawski and despite the so-called sexual frankness of his films I still feel a clinging odour of Catholic belief or non-belief in his films. Good is good etc and bad is bad and the monster of sexuality in his most known work ' Possession ' gets brief showings here. I want to avoid spoilers but I did not believe in her relationship with her husband played by Pascal Greggory and nothing conveyed a real passion between them. Greggory can be very capable as an actor, but not here. Overall it is a superficial film and despite Zulawski's attempts at profundity I have repeatedly seen him fail. The worst example was the woefully bad ' L'amour Braque ' based again loosely on another literary source Dostoyevsky's ' The Idiot '. Not a good film, but neither is it unwatchable. Despite outcries from one reviewer I did not see one penis, and the sexuality in the film was well below zero in temperature.