Voleur de vie

I haven't read the novel by Steinunn Sigurdardottir, but the film version that transports the story from Iceland to the rocky isle of Ouessant off the coast of Brittany has many moments of beauty amid the slow unfolding of the plot. Emmanuelle Beart and Sandrine Bonnaire represent two opposites: Alda is impulsive, a sexual tease, unsatisfied with her surroundings; while Olga is steady, motherly, devoted to her family (which includes the dead members, who are constantly referred to). It's hard not to see the skull beneath the skin when you live next to a cemetery.

Bonnaire has a wonderful scene at Christmas time where she watches her sister and daughter dancing to a sensual song and must accept that her life is coming to a close. She is so much the anchor and compass of this movie. Vahina Giocante is wonderful as the daughter, who has to steer a course between the extremes of the two older women. Emmanuel Beart does a fair job as the pixie Alda, but has been better for Sautet (Un coeur en hiver). This isn't Yves Angelo's best picture--that would be Colonel Chabert--but he gets the emotional tone right.

This movie is really boring. Everything is so slow, dark, depressing. The family in itself could be interesting: 3 totally different women living under the same roof. The two sisters are both self destructive in their own way. This story might have been in great book, but the movie isn't. The acting isn't even very good - Bonnaire and Beart are far from being at their best! Go only if you like Ouessant's wild landscapes...

Ultimately, the movie seems to lack ambition - coming close to the kind of cliched French movie that's ridiculed for consisting mainly of a lot of musing in attractive settings, but that ultimately fails to deliver anything new (apart maybe from the slightly Gothic setting of the old house overlooking the cemetery) or insightful. The structure involves a dead sister whose birthday is celebrated on Beart's own (and who shares the same name); one surviving sister who is self-servingly promiscuous and another who verges on being a recluse (but who had a child at sixteen, entailing that perhaps her passion was spent thereafter, leaving only the possibility of an early death) and the teenage daughter whose outlook is forged by a synthesis of these two role models - there are plenty of vague ideas there about influences and parallels and transference (Beart having stolen perhaps not only the dead girl's life but also much of Bonnaire's, and that of the teacher who kills himself near the start after she rejects him, and bits and pieces of her lovers') but it never coalesces into anything worthwhile. The would-be brooding elegant restrained tone serves only to keep it at arm's length.

Nothing new for Emmanuelle Beart or her fans... I bought this video from an online french "Amazon.com" equivalent, and was not surprised at all from what I saw. Not even Emmanuelle Beart's divine beauty can save this picture. Ms. Beart, please "NO" more prostitutes,adulteress women, or tormented souls. I beg you to give your fans another comedy! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!

-Gil-