La chambre bleue

This is exactly the kind of movie which grows on you.Based on a Simenon book , the story could have descended towards the banalities of the love triangle , a situation we've been told so many times here there and everywhere.That the opening scene may be very hot does not help for that matter.

Mathieu Amalric is fully aware of this ;his film looks like a jig saw puzzle ,with a very smart construction . When his film begins ,the die is cast :it's a long questioning by policemen and judges ; all the tragedy is told little by little, with flashbacks and portraits of the characters alive of dead : Almaric does not even fall in the trap of sentimentality : this is amour fou,in the fullest sense of the term ,but the characters are not really endearing : Esther is a selfish unsympathetic attractive woman who "waits-deadpan- for her sick husband to die " and one cannot blame her mother-in-law 's petulant attitude .The same goes for her lover -not so handsome ,after all - who 's got everything going for him ,a loving wife -with whom the viewer has a tendency to side, mainly when he knows the truth ,a cute child ,a desirable dwelling -one of the envious men calls it a b......t house during the trial- and thriving business.

This looks like a news item : one has the odd feeling of discovering the affair day by day ,with new revelations ; and Amalric deserves a bouquet for sparing us a looooong trial with the de rigueur brilliant lawyer : in this context ,it would be totally irrelevant : amour fou can't be explained ,period.

Mathieu Amalric isn't one to shy away from a risky project—has anybody seen the film where he plays a shrink and Benicio Del Toro's a Blackfoot WWII vet with PTSD? Here he and his real-life partner, Stéphanie Cléau, co-star in a stripped-down 75' adaptation of a Simenon story of erotic obsession and justice gone awry. The fine performances and the film's time-shuffling structure help maintain a high level of suspense at least past the halfway mark, though it seems to me that Amalric and Cléau, who also wrote the script, might have thrown a little too much of Simenon's backstory out with the bathwater.

The plodding inquiry that begins even before we know a crime has been committed certainly explains Julien's (MA's character's) air of glum fatalism through the second half of the film, but the script's intense focus on the two lovers doesn't prepare us for the final courtroom scene, in which a character we've barely seen before steps into the spotlight. (I'm planning to watch again to test the hypothesis, suggested by some online reviewers, that the crime the protags are charged with was committed by someone else…)

The courtroom scene has a nightmarish quality, like one of Hitchcock's "wrong man" films; the trial itself seems like an open-mic session where gossipy townsfolk step up to air their gripes about the defendants—one witness dismisses Julien's stylish modernist house as a "crappy little shack." There's certainly a disconnect between Simenon's view of blind, blundering justice and our own no doubt idealized police procedurals and courtroom dramas; I agree with other reviewers that Julien would have excellent grounds for appeal on the basis of blatant judicial bias and ineffective counsel.

about desire. about the role of the other. about flesh and love and hidden by yourself sins, about the search of yourself and about the fall of a night.about justice. a film who mix, in wise manner, the seduction with fascination. a work of beauty and dark secrets and images of victims and fragile intentions. it could be the film of Mathieu Amalric. like many of his films because he has the science and the gift to propose the right solution for the tone of story. because it is a film of details, about a not special event, in which the states of characters remains the only significant thing. so, a film who must see. for the acting first. then, for atmosphere.

Slow moving (although only 76 minutes long), starting in the middle of confusion and sexual passion, and only very gradually revealing exactly what the central mystery being examined even is. All we know is that middle-class Julien (expertly played by director Amalric) and sexy, cold and intense Esther (the excellent Stephanie Cleau) have tremendous sexual chemistry, if not much real emotion between them. They are both married to other people, and we soon learn something awful has happened that has caused Julien to be under intense questioning by the police. All the other details are only revealed bit by bit as the story jumps around through a fractured time-scape.

Amalric uses the camera to underline and echo elements of the tricky construction, using odd, disquieting close ups that give us only a bit of the big picture, or pulling back to beautifully framed but distant feeling wider shots that give us the geography, but don't let us inside. The performances too – both by the leads and all the supporting characters – also serve the style. They're all dense and meticulously detailed, but it's up to us to figure out what those subtle details of behavior mean. Is that glance a look of love? Desire? Contempt? Does Julien's lawyer believe him? Does Julien's wife suspect or not?

If ultimately this adaptation of a Georges Simenon piece isn't quite as powerful as it's opening leads one to hope, it's still a smart, chilling and impressive directorial effort for Amalric.

This is a story from which one can see how desperately poor French justice system is. Their policemen are notori ous, but potential for injustice is even worse. In a small French village provincial town, a couple unsuccessfully tries to hide their affair. A family man is caught into adultery in a leg-web by cold and predatory female lover who had a crush on him since high school, but because of the rigid class system he never approached her. She contorts a way to get him between her spread legs (expl icitly shown several times), and replace her unloved but well off dying husband. She is married into pharmacy, and when a husband dies it is unclear if foul play is at play. But her mother in law has no doubts and decides to avenge her offspring by poisoning his son wife lover's family via convenient fact that they get plum jam from her. Weather the depiction of the obnoxiously unjust and plain stup id court and investigation system of France is realistic (and yes, it is that horrible, if not even more so, especially if you are a minority, and police is even worse), this is a stylistic attempt to say something about passion and such things. But toxic femininity - French way, wins the day, and a confused male victim, who is not manly enough to counter the horrible forces of female venom in all its editions, gets destroyed. His leggy lover, guilty or not (point a bit moot) fares better, as in her feminine mind she won them a life together as lifetime jailbirds if not lovebirds. Horrible - if only for a system, that convicts based on close to zero evidence, maximum prejudice and Gallic investigative incompetence, is an insult to intelligence - but in France, incompetence and arrogance go hand in hand together with a solid web of sensationalistic tabloid press and trial by ordeal level of judicial primi tivism. In addition, French provincialism has not changed much from the time of "The Raven", brilliant portrayal of true French mentality that remains unchanged at least from their glorious Vichy days circa 1943.