I’ve not loved Kristin Scott Thomas at all, really, until this film. She’s not my type, this English-born actress with the poised, class-advantaged, British sang froid. Prior to this film, I thought of her as a kind of pure bred Weimar, elegant head and carriage, clean lines, lean flanks, but not someone I’d want in my house. Miraculously, in I've Loved You So Long, she makes me feel great sympathy for essentially the same traits that repulsed me in Horse Whisperer. I applaud Ms. Scott Thomas for having the courage to strip off her star glow and show us what a truly stressed, aging woman really looks. Subsequently, I netflixed Angels and Insects, and experienced yet another dimension of her talent and heart (great flick).
In ILYFSL, KST plays Juliette Fontaine, a middle-aged woman who reappears in her younger sister Lea’s (Elsa Zylberstein) life after an unexplained fifteen year absence. The film is about Juliette’s slow, awkward, tormented dance of reengagement with the world - - and the self - - she left behind. It also chronicles how the two sisters, once so close, come to know each other again after life has separated them for so long.
Writer/ director Philippe Claudel plods and dawdles his way through tricky emotional terrain but I left the film feeling moved by this dark, tender and ultimately touching melodrama. The film’s focus is narrow, Juliette and Lea are the only characters with any dimension, but it reaches deep if you allow it to.
I won’t say more about the story but can’t resist making a couple of comparisons. Although ILYFSL is set in a well-to-do British household and community, it looks and feels a little like Million Dollar Baby with its stripped down sets, guarded personalities and mean streets. Many post-modern Victorian dramas, such as Remains of the Day, are downbeat and dark but ILYFSL’s extreme palette pushes the genre out of it’s bleak house comfort zone into a new and exciting place. The edginess and existential unease of our era has penetrated, lo, even unto storied British reserve.
KST’s Juliette has some of the wary defensiveness of Kevin Bacon’s Walter in The Woodsman and some of the inner torment of Meryl Streep’s Sophie in Sophie’s Choice.
That is to say that there are no happy feet in this flick. Although, to be fair, there is the occasional warm bubble of amusement above the flinty pain.
In the end, the film succeeded in carrying me into, arguably, the thorniest stretch of the existential briar patch: How does one live with, and not deny or rationalize, the consequences of hurting others? And, more to the point with Juliette, how does one forgive oneself and open one’s heart to life again?
These are not the kind of questions likely to pop up on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in America, India or anywhere else. But the idea of using a life line to call a friend, loved one or relation usually at least shifts the burden we carry, and somehow makes the load lighter.
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3 comments:
I really liked your write up for ILYSL and the wonderful connections you made to other roles and other movies. (Your use of language is so engaging.) I personally have always loved KST. I see where you could find her aloof but I don’t see the “..sang foid” you refer to. For me her eyes are always captivating as the mirror to the deep well of unexpressed emotions she keeps inside. In her, like in myself, I see someone who is not comfortable expressing her deep inner self.
I'm going tonight for the second time, several months after
the movie left me breathless, and thinking that I couldn't take it another time.
(Next day) It was just as good the second time. That's an excellently well-made movie--no excess; and each scene contributes to the whole. The two
women-friends I went with both liked it, too, to my relief.
[I first saw Kristen S-T in The English Patient, where Ralph Fiennes carried her into a cave in the desert and left her there, injured, while he went off to get help. When he returned, he found her dead and carried her out of the cave. Only it was clear that in real time he had carried her in and right back out again, and the movie just spliced the carry into two pieces sandwiched around his going away and returning. And it was so ridiculous, I couldn't take anything about
the movie seriously.]
There's been a dearth of movies this past year, I think.
I don't think I could see "So Long" again. Too painful, and I already know her true story so the reveal would not have the pop that it did the first time. On the other hand, I did see "Million Dollar Baby" again, and enjoyed it knowing the ending.
The "English Patient" seemed a bit pretentious to me and that was off-putting. The mummified weave of bandages woven around the patient make an interesting metaphor for the way we insulate ourselves from others, holding our wounds closer than our friends. But the film's treatment made it seem more like a Monty Python sketch than a serious drama. I found it cloying and annoying. I had a similar reaction, for the same reasons, to "Death in Venice." Perhaps I am allergic to high culture.
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