Word: claudell
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...begins I've Loved You So Long, a finely modulated and totally absorbing first film by Philippe Claudel, who is better known, at least in France, as a novelist. In a few minutes her sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), arrives to conduct Juliette to what amounts to her new life - as a guest in Léa's home, which consists of Luc, her grumpy husband, two adopted daughters and Luc's father, who is unfailingly cheerful despite the fact that a stroke has rendered him mute. It's an inherently awkward situation, rendered much more...
...accepting of her - and they occasionally ask her the direct questions about her past that the adults prefer not to bring up. The speechless grandfather establishes a benign connection, mainly through the love of reading he shares with Juliette. A man even appears - patient, unglamorous and someone who, like Claudel himself, has worked in prisons and understands the devastation that long-term incarceration can cause. Most important, there is Léa. It is she who has loved Juliette so long and who is determined to bring her back to the land of the living. She is intelligent...
...performance is about small, believable, human gestures which sometimes fail, sometimes succeed, but eventually restore Juliette to something like life. A modest victory that is not presented triumphantly. I have heard this criticism advanced about the movie: that Claudel holds back from the audience the crucial information that Juliette's crime was morally defensible, which implies that calumny she suffers for it is indefensible, or at least too crudely judged. I think otherwise. This is not a movie about setting an injustice to rights. It is more profoundly about Juliette coming to grips with herself, freeing herself from...
...MOVIE I've Loved You So Long From The English Patient to Gosford Park, Kristin Scott Thomas has oozed aristocracy. In Philippe Claudel's French drama, she occupies a private palace of pain as an ex-con reuniting with her sister (Elsa Zylberstein). This fine rehab film has a long fuse and a potent payoff...
...these cross-cultural matings warble. Philippe Claudel's pale meditation on the emptiness of suburbia is no match for Sarajevo-born American Aleksandar Hemon's moving account of an immigrant door-to-door salesman working the Chicago suburbs. France's Lydie Salvayre spins a ho-hum tale of a man with an untamable cowlick, and Rikki Ducornet responds with a limp portrait of the aging French cancan dancer La Goulue. But then, all of the writers in As You Were Saying (and their translators) contributed their services without pay. It is easy to imagine that some of the stories were...