La Fidélité

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.

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.

I like French cinema and Sophie Marceau in particular, so i was expecting great things of this film, but i have to say i was disappointed. It's not awful, but it's not great either - the first half of the film is pretty poor, but it redeems itself to some degree in the latter stages.

After the first half hour i thought i had paid to see a soft-porn flick, such was the lack of plot, direction and character. Not a lot happens to begin with except Marceau s****ing every bloke who glances her way, plus the occasional scene with her infirm mother - a broken woman who chose duty over love in her choice of husband. The film then progresses to chart Marceau's path along the duty vs. love road, although it does so in a very contrived way.

The characters are fairly one-dimensional, and it's not until the last hour or so that there is any real emotion to the film. By this time the director seems to have lost the plot, and the film changes tone very noticeably (think: From Dusk 'til Dawn - ok maybe not that bad, but bad enough). One minute it's a drama, then it's an action flick. Then back to drama again, and very disjointed it is too. It finally ends back in the drama fold, and does at least ask a few questions about the theme of the film, Fidelity, but for a film that's 3 hours long they're not very deep and not very well portrayed, and i left the cinema thinking: "what a missed opportunity!". Disappointing.

Billed as a highlight of this year's Martell French Film tour of the UK, Fidelity runs for slightly over three hours. But despite its length, it tackles far too much. I could list off a dozen themes from it but it's hard enough making this readable. I liked Sophie Marceau and Pascal Greggory but characterisation is not a strong point of this film.

La Fidélité's ambitions, some of its subject matter, and the fact that it's three hours long, are a bit like another recent French film, Pola X. That film was even more over the top and over-reaching. Also, it didn't have Sophie Marceau, and it was, frankly, mad. So arguably Pola X was a worse flop than this film, but it had visual imagination. Which went a long way, and left me feeling less conned than I did after three hours of this.

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