Mal de pierres

I watched this at home on DVD from my local library. My wife skipped, she doesn't enjoy reading subtitles. It is mostly in French and I watched it with English subtitles.

I got the movie mainly because it features Marion Cotillard. She is a lovely lady and one of the best actresses of the current generation.

Here she is Gabrielle, part of a farming family in France that includes her dad and mom, plus a younger sister. We see that she was difficult growing up, what some may call "mean." And also fixated on nudity and sex. Looking like she might never marry, her parents made a deal with one of the workers, a Mr. Rabascal, if he would marry her then they would help set him up with his own masonry business. He agrees, Gabrielle eventually goes along, but she tells him directly that she will never love him and they will not have husband-wife relations. In her magnanimity she tells him she doesn't mind if he goes into the city to hire a prostitute.

I will not say much more except to say it is mainly a character study of Gabrielle, how she deals with her difficult personality, in the end trying to achieve some happiness with her husband and son who has a gift for playing the piano.

Marion Cotillard is superb.

From an early age, "Gabrielle" (Marion Cotillard) has shown a bit of a rebellious spirit. As a girl, she was determined not to obey her parental wish to marry the local "Jose" (a subtly nuanced effort from Alex Brendemühl) - even though he was quite fond of her, and as a result she lived in the semi-seclusion that befitted an unwed girl in rural France. Her "break" comes in the unlikely form of some kidney stones that necessitates a trip to an Alpine hospital. It's here that she encounters the recovering "André" (Louis Garrel) who has just returned from French Indochina shell-shocked and badly wounded. There's a little of a Wildred Owen poem to this drama, I thought. It shows us the results of the horrors of war, the after effects and trauma, but there's also a degree of hope and optimism as their love story takes shape and maybe, just maybe, there's scope for contentment somewhere. Cotillard is on solid form as the rather self-obsessed and just a bit flaky "Gabrielle" and though Garrel doesn't have so much to do, he still comes across convincingly as a soldier conflicted by a reality and a dream - it's that conclusion that is quite a touching affair, and causes us to have a think about just who "Gabrielle" actually is. The film looks good and is well scored by Daniel Pemberton which all gives a certain lustre to Cotillard's portrayal of a woman I don't think I'd have liked very much.

Greetings again from the darkness. Director Nicole Garcia (The Adversary, 2002) takes the best-selling novel from Milena Agus and hearkens back to good old-fashioned movie melodrama – with a French twist. Of course, most any project is elevated with the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard in the lead role. Few can suffer on screen as expertly as Ms. Cotillard, and she conveys that disquiet through most of this story.

What is love? You'd best not look to Gabrielle (Cotillard) for clarification. As a young woman, her search for love and sexual fulfillment follows the fantasies of the novels she reads (Wuthering Heights). Her corresponding inappropriate behavior teeters between delusion and hysteria. It's the 1950's in rural France, so her actions and attitude are not much appreciated, and her parents bribe Jose (Alex Brendemuhl), a local bricklayer, to marry Gabrielle. She is then given the choice of (an "arranged") marriage or a mental institution.

As a romantic dreamer whose blurred reality expects love to mirror those romance novels, Gabrielle's self-centeredness and failure to grasp reality results in a loveless marriage – and easily one of the most uncomfortable lovemaking scenes in the history of French cinema. Beyond that, severe kidney stones make it impossible for her to bear children. In hopes of "the cure", she is sent for treatment to a spa in the Alps (it's the same spa from Paolo Sorrentino's 2015 film YOUTH).

While at the spa, she meets handsome Andre (Louis Garrel), a gravely ill soldier from the Indochina War. Gabrielle imagines Andre to be everything she dreamt a lover should be (except for that whole sickness thing). The contrast between the two love-making sessions is startling, and it seems as though Gabrielle has found her bliss.

The years pass after her release from the spa, and Gabrielle makes one mistake after another … blind to what and who is right in front of her … while holding on to the dreamer's dream. She is certainly not a likable person, and is downright cruel to her loyal (and extremely quiet) husband Jose. However, Ms. Cotillard is such an accomplished actress that we somehow pull for Gabrielle to "snap out of it".

The novel was adapted by Jacques Fieschi, Natalie Carter and director Garcia, and you'll likely either be a fan or not, depending on your taste for old-fashioned melodrama. Despite numerous awkward moments, it's beautifully photographed by cinematographer Christophe Beaucame. Additionally, the music plays a vital role here – both composer Daniel Pemberton's use of the violin, and the duality of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto that connects Gabrielle's two worlds. You may say she's a dreamer, but I hope she's the only one.

I will be honest, I did see this film because it is directed by Nicole Garcia, one outstanding female French director, the best I guess. She has a very sensitive way of filming. So, I did go to see this film without hesitating. And of course I don't regret it at all. Marion Cotillard, whom I don't particularly appreciate, is at her best here. Although I don't crave for her, she is a damn good actress, but sorry, I felt a little emptiness here, I don't really know where. Something missed somewhere. The actors and actresses around her are flawless, but I persist on my opinion. I don't think that's a matter of directing. Not with Nicole Garcia. Maybe because this kind of scheme has already been told a hundred times before.

But it remains a good film.

'From the Land of the Moon' tells the tale of Gabrielle (Marion Cotillard) who develops an unfortunate - and unreciprocated - sexual obsession with her local teacher in 1950s rural France. Her mother hastily arranges for her to be married off to itinerant Spanish workman José (Alex Brendemühl), who can not even be bothered shaving for their wedding day. Gabrielle resigns herself to a loveless marriage - charging José 200 francs for sex - before she has to stay at a Swiss spa to be treated for 'stones sickness' (not, as you might think, an obsession with Mick Jagger et al, but kidney stones). At the spa she meets aristocratic soldier André (Louis Garrel), with whom she develops a deep (though, to her disappointment, platonic) relationship. But when André leaves and Gabrielle returns to José, how will her experiences have changed her?

I spent much of the film trying to work out how old Gabrielle is supposed to be: when the film opens the story suggests she is the equivalent of a sixth form student, but Cotillard, in her forties, hardly looks the part. In other respects, though, she is perfect, conveying with the minimum of fuss Gabrielle's undercurrent of frustration with her lot in life - and the look she gives the man with whom she has ended up in the film's very last shot speaks volumes. Brendemühl and Garrel are pretty much Cotillard's supporting players (after all, neither of *them* has an Oscar!) but both make the most of their parts, again without resorting to over-acting.

Subtlety is the watchword in setting the film's period, too: director Nicole Garcia choosing to express it with costumes, interior decorations and cars, rather than beating the viewer around the head with pop songs from the time as other directors might be tempted to do. There no big explosions, no screeching-wheeled car chases; this is simply a film about human emotions - and contains a twist I certainly did not see coming. Well worth a viewing.