Il y a longtemps que je t'aime/I've Loved You So Long (2008) -

A measured, assuredly enigmatic character study of a woman recently released from prison after having served a fifteen-year sentence for murder. Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a masterful performance as Juliette, a woman stunned by the circumstances of her crime, her sentence, and her return to society through the loving embrace of her devoted younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein, in an endearing and charismatic, yet curiously unrealized performance). The film follows Thomas's Juliette and Zylberstein's Léa as they awkwardly maneuver the pitfalls of Juliette's reentrance to provincial French society. Thomas's performance animates the central tension of the film. Juliette killed her young son and, when charged with and tried for the crime, opted for steely silence as her husband, her family, her profession and society-at-large judged her crime as a monstrous offense to nature. The film delivers this information in tiny fragments and Thomas's performance amplifies the mystery at every turn. Thomas's Juliette appears as a survivor of a death camp, her fine features drawn into a taut and impassive mask. Recoiling at the merest touch, seemingly resigned to the impossibility of her plight, Thomas's Juliette is a portrait of resigned ostracization. It is clear that Thomas's Juliette expects to be loathed, to experience the cruel spit of invective, to be forever banished from civilized society. So, when Ziberstein's Léa offers instead the welcome of a loving embrace into her own modest but wonderful life, Thomas's Juliette experiences an even more profound mortification. Will she be able to "come back into life"? Or has she been so damaged by her crime/conviction/incarceration as to be forever alienated from the sustaining simplicity of human connection? It's a compelling premise, assembled upon a routinely electrifying central performance. Yet as entrancing as Kristen Scott Thomas's performance was, the film itself felt like a contrivance. I hope it's not giving too much away to say that the film's single narrative impetus is the redemption of the reviled heroine through plot machinations that echo those advocated within the film by an especially awful tertiary character. For me, the plot contrivances proved unfortunate for, as the film seeks the explanation of Juliette's monstrous past actions and then finds them embedded in mysteriously concealed circumstances, the story begins to feel ever cheaper. Indeed, by the end of the narrative, Juliette's stony silence seems less a symptom of post-traumatic stress than a self-inflicted injury borne of selfish stupidity. It's a testament to Thomas's charisma that I remained in thrall of her character despite the late character/plot revelations. (For a movie so stylized as high naturalism, the plot is straight out of Scribe and Sardou's formula of the Well-Made Play -- with the central character experiencing obstacle after obstacle that amplifies the central narrative tension until all is resolved, typically with the revelation of some withheld secret, thus permitting the audience the shared relief of a collective exhale.) Indeed, I felt manipulated by the cheap formula on the one hand and cheated of a richer story on the other. Basically, the film is built nearly entirely upon the complicated challenge of empathizing with Thomas's Juliette, especially given the allegedly monstrous aspects of her crime/s. Yet, when the final "secrets" are discovered/revealed, the revelation utterly simplifies the central moral quandary of the film. I suspect I might anticipate a defense of the film as a meta-comment on the 19th century novel and its construction of the nobly suffering literary heroine but, really, I don't buy it. (And we won't even get into the weird subplot of the parole officer, a noxiously cynical, callow and uncharismatic plot device, not unlike virtually all the scenes depicting Léa's life as a literature professor.) Yet what is perhaps most dismaying about the narrative confines (or, natch, "narrative prison") of this film is the way it makes Zilberstein do so much heavy lifting while, in effect, depending on her character to play the fool to the central character's self-annihilating deception. Zilberstein is appealing and she has her moments but she's routinely overshadowed by the showier scenes given her co-protagonist. (Indeed, I think that's part of what pisses me off. Zilberstein should be co-lead in this but the force of narrative conceit insists that she play second banana, which diminishes the clarity of both Léa's character and the actress's work in the role. The film at every turn refuses to let this be a two-hander.) Thomas gets great moment after great moment -- the scene at the dinner party, the subsequent encounter with Michel, the explosive revelation scene, the encounter with the mother -- but Zilberstein's big outburst (that student smackdown) is unmoored and nearly comic. The film invests Zilberstein's Léa with a kind of naive cluelessness (her precocious daughter routinely outshines her in the insight department) that, by the end, begins to feel especially cruel. All told, I found the film deeply, cynically disappointing. Thomas is utterly marvelous in the role but that's almost to be expected as the entire apparatus is designed to make her the subject of our fascination. And it's to her credit that her performance is so consistently worthy our most rapt, curious attention.