Movie Review

I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime)
Release       : 2008
Country      : France
Cert (UK)    : 12A
Runtime     : 115 mins
Directors   : Philippe Claudel
Cast         : Claire Johnston, Elsa Zylberstein, Frederic Peirrot, Frederic Pierrot, Kristin Scott Thomas, Laurent Grevill, Serge HazanaviciusPeter Bradshaw 
The Guardian, Friday September 26 2008

The presence of Kristin Scott Thomas in this literate French movie by Philippe Claudel is so powerfully distinctive that it's as if Claudel has not merely written the lead role for her, but extrapolated his film's entire narrative structure from Scott Thomas's personality. Her formidable bilingual presence, her beauty - elegant and drawn in early middle age - her air of hypersensitive awareness of all the tiny absurdities and indignities with which she is surrounded, coupled with a drolly lenient reticence: it all creates an intelligent, observant drama about dislocation, fragility and the inner pain of unshakeable memories. Scott Thomas is on screen for almost every minute of the film, often in close-up and her face is at once eloquent and deeply withdrawn.

She plays Juliette, a fortysomething woman who after a long and painful separation has been taken in by her younger sister Léa, played by Elsa Zylberstein. When we first see Juliette, being picked up at the airport, she wears no makeup and smokes perpetually; she has a dowdy grey cardigan of the sort worn in girls' boarding schools, and has clearly been institutionalised in some awful way. 

Juliette and Léa's childhood home was near Rouen, but Léa has now moved with her husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) and two young children to Nancy, in eastern France. The film's regional identity is cleverly underlined with material about intense football rivalries, and soccer-mad Luc's resentment of biased sports coverage in the Parisian papers. 

Juliette's English-accented French is explained by the fact that she spent some time in England and that the women's mother (played by Claire Johnston) is English, a patient with dementia in an old people's home. Juliette's sole meeting with the old woman is a brashly tremendous coup de cinéma, which Claudel saves up for the very end: a dramatic flourish like something from Tennessee Williams. 

The reason for Juliette's absence is a grim, unnameable secret. It is the elephant in the living room whose shadow has fallen over all their lives, and it is only when Juliette goes for job interviews, or for mandatory meetings with her welfare case-worker, or the local police officer with whom she must sign in once a week, that she can speak the truth aloud. This Juliette does with a crisp, proud defiance, and a perverse pleasure in shocking and upsetting people, to pre-empt their judgment and their scorn.

In a series of cleverly constructed, indirect dialogue scenes, Claudel shows how Juliette's 15-year-old secret has sent her entire family into shock and a collective dysfunction. Ironically, it is Juliette who has been able to look the facts squarely in the face and, having had a decade and a half to come to terms with it, is relatively well adjusted. But Léa, carrying the twin burdens of her own family respectability and the need to appease her parents' angry demands for silence on the matter, has had to spend her adult life in denial. To her astonishment, Juliette realises that her secret has induced in Léa a kind of learned amnesia about their shared youth, and she is enraged that Léa has made life choices that look like an agonised repudiation of Juliette's past. Yet all this makes Léa's passionate need to reach out to her damaged sister all the more moving. 

Scott Thomas and Zylberstein make good sisters. It is not simply that they look plausibly similar, but not too similar, it is that they act out sibling tension so well: the tricky magnetic field made up of shared memories, rivalries, intimacies. (I couldn't help wondering what a film about sisters starring Kristin Scott Thomas and her own sister Serena would look like.) For a novelist, Philippe Claudel shows remarkable skill with his first feature film: in fact, his script is almost a screenplay masterclass, absorbing a lot of facts and story into a small space, but without any uncomfortable cramming, and he adroitly suggests the slow process by which Juliette is gradually accepted into the family and the community. With miraculous efficiency, he creates for Juliette a flirtation with a melancholy cop, a sexual encounter with a bumptious guy in a bar, and a growing, tender intimacy with Léa's colleague and fellow lecturer Michel (Laurent Grevill). Enough material for a whole soap opera season is miraculously reduced to feature length.

Having set his story in Nancy, Claudel self-consciously alludes to one of the region's most famous sons: Eric Rohmer, who is hotly defended in a dinner party conversation in opposition to the flashy Americans. Ironically, though, the montage sequence that this follows, showing the delights of a very French family party in the country, is a little sugary and Hollywoodish. Very different from Rohmer.

My only quarrel with this drama is that the final revelation, when it comes, is a little strained. It turns on the discovery of a photo and certain details on the back of a handwritten poem, but these details, as well as not being spelled out, do not appear to offer us much more knowledge than we, by this stage, have already gleaned. Scott Thomas's performance, easily the best of her career, countermands any such qualms: the centre of a deeply involving, beautifully acted and expertly constructed human drama by and for grown-ups.