I judge a film to be great not by the quality of the acting, the script, the direction, or the production. A really great film produces a profound feeling when it ends. The emotion is often similar. It's like being struck with an arrow. I don't agree with Aristotle and Hollywood that the aim of a film is to produce catharsis and make people feel better. A great film produces a new positive emotion, not to recover and purge a suppressed one.
I can't name that feeling. It includes pain for the suffering of life and awe at the mystery and depth of it. It includes joy at the possibilities of it. It's something like what a cathedral inspires. Tarkovsky said the aim of art is to render the soul capable of turning to good. The feeling is like a fire that consumes pettiness.
This film caused that feeling in me, so for me it is scientifically proven that it is a great film. No criticism of the film can touch that precious feeling.
It has a low rating (now 5.4) on IMDB. It's not surprising. The film is adapted from prize winning novel by Véronique Ovaldé. The film is more literature than popular entertainment. Lancelot, the main character is impossible to like or admire. He is the opposite of the legendary Lancelot. We watch films generally to escape our lives and who we are and identify for a time without someone we would like to be having a life we would like to have. The second part this film does provide; the main character finds true love. One reason people may rate the film so low is that it doesn't provide a likable main character.
But that is one element that makes the film unique. There are a lot of people like Lancelot.
However uncharismatic, unattractive (my reaction anyway, with those glasses), and unadmirable the main character is in every way, Julien Boisselier portrays him exactly as he needs to be for the film. He is not the romantic antihero, the renegade criminal, or any other type of hero. He is a repressed cold fish. His love is Irene, who is confident, creative, beautiful, and outgoing. Whatever attracted her to him was invisible to me. Her attraction is immediate, love at first sight.
Lancelot is writing a book on Paul Verlaine, and he quotes the poem "Oft Do I Dream" about longing for a true love. This is a universal human desire, our core social drive. The film turns around the posibiity of true love, but not in a sugared fantasy. At times it gets so dark that I was on the brink of stopping it. This all elevates the film to the archtypal.
The excellent actor Caterina Murino plays Lancelot's lover. She is well able to bring to life the woman of Verlaine' dream.
The film takes place in gorgeous Sicilian landscapes and cities, even though everyone speaks French. The director uses the camera like a telescope to bring us close and closer to the characters, which works well because they are giving great performances. The artistically effective camera work is one of the beauties of the film. It has in many places a charming laugh-out-loud dark humor that somehow melds with the tragic tone of much of the film .
The script and direction skillfully use exposition to fit a novel into the feature film format remarkably well. That is nearly impossible to do, yet after the film you feel as if you have absorbed an entire novel in detail. Sometimes I wanted to be shown something that was told in brief summary, but it wasn't critical for the story line. It must be abridged from the novel, but you don't feel it at all.
It is interesting for such a quintessentially French film that Americans rate it more highly than the French (and for some reason Brazilians much lower.)
If you like literate and moving French cinema, or are a fan of Murino, then like me you may really like the film.
