Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Gabrielle / France / Germany / Italy / 2005

Gabrielle’s stylistic features – the slipping between black-and-white and colour, the large white text that appears at times over the image, the obtrusive, excessively operatic music – is a sticking-point for many in an appreciation of this film, but I thought it was tremendous. Above all, Eric Gautier’s cinematography, whether it’s the Visconti-like movement around the golden glows of a society dinner table, or the dark tones of the icy-cold loveless mansion, is amazing: there’s a particularly striking sequence where two maids carrying a single lamp move up the levels of the house extinguishing the lights until the camera returns downstairs to the darkened hall and the frozen figure of the husband. I like the constant shifts in tone, shifts between loquacity and a sullen inarticulateness, and I like the way the film refuses the now standard if not traditional Ibsenite path of the liberation of the wife from an oppressive husband. Apparently, Chereau conceived the story more along these broadly feminist lines, but it’s not apparent in the film itself. The characters of wife and husband (a superb Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory)are ambigous and never entirely clear-cut, always refusing an easy analysis on our part. Our sympathies likewise keep moving and shifting, right up to an emotionally shocking finale.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
26 Nov 2006 11:14 AM | Comments (5)

Comments / 5 total / Submit Comment

1. leo / 27 November 2006 / 9:17 AM / URL

   I, er, disagree. Sure, the cinematography is lovely, and Huppert and Greggory make a grand effort, but their characters are so thin, so cliché (especially Hervey the Collector [thud!]), that these admittedly rewarding elements have very little to back them up. The Ibsen variation also struck me as a rather empty novelty, a vain and unconvincing attempt to modernize a familiar, but far more sensible narrative. Ibsen’s work challenged contemporary gender imbalances by artfully toying with the audience’s sympathies, whereas Chereau’s is blithely black-and-white (in its ethics, wholly so; cinematographically — and pointlessly — about 30% of the time). Ibsen’s play is revolutionary, where Chereau’s film feels utterly irrelevant to me, little more than a warmed-over museum piece.

2. Ian / 27 November 2006 / 7:05 PM / URL

   We’ll have to agree to disagree here. But cinematically this is more than just lovely – it’s thrilling. I don’t think Gabrielle adds anything especially new to this narrative situation, but “vain-empty-irrelevant-museum-piece” seems excessively negative to me. And I certainly don’t see anything black-and-white about the film’s “ethics” if by this you mean the portrayal of the balance between husband and wife.

3. leo / 27 November 2006 / 7:48 PM / URL

   I think I simply found Hervey to be a cartoonish ogre, devoid of even the most basic sensitivity or empathy, and self-centered to a point that struck me as simply ludicrous. He’s a straw-man of 19th-century misogyny, and fun though it is to watch Greggory ham this up, it’s a flimsy basis for drama. Perhaps it would have worked better as farce: with the pointless, artsy-fartsy textual flourishes, it was already about three quarters of the way there.

4. Ian / 28 November 2006 / 10:35 AM / URL

   Well, I found more shades to the characterisation, certainly points of sensitivity and empathy as Hervey’s world-view collapses. Sounds rather like we’ve been watching completely different films!

5. leo / 28 November 2006 / 10:55 AM / URL

   Who knows? Maybe we have been watching different films. This is the one with the underwater frogman-battle at the end, right?