Leaving
Partir
Catherine Corsini (2009)
Sergi López was highly convincing as the malfeasant hotel manager in Dirty Pretty Things and as the wicked stepfather in Pan’s Labyrinth. In Leaving he plays Ivan, an ex-con builder with whom the heroine Suzanne falls in love, and his portrait is fully rounded. Ivan is as likeable as he’s fallible and López, who used his burly masculinity to sinister effect in the two earlier roles, is physically very believable here as a labourer. He’s able too to realise different psychological and intellectual types: Ivan has nothing in common with the shrewdly calculating Captain Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth yet López seems equally natural as a man who is brawn rather than brains – his empathetic performance is quite free of condescension. In his early scenes with Kristin Scott Thomas as Suzanne, you see in Ivan’s eyes flickers of incredulity that he’s making it with this beautiful, classy woman. When Suzanne’s husband is sabotaging her attempts to start a new life with Ivan, the latter exclaims melodramatically that he’s ‘cursed’ and López is very good at suggesting that Ivan’s physical strength and charm obscure a streak of self-pitying weakness. It’s too bad that the script, which Catherine Corsini wrote with Gaëlle Macé, is thin: there’s no hint that the more determined Suzanne might be affected by signs of Ivan’s cowardly selfishness, that they might complicate her feelings about him. He continues to be, simply and unassailably, the man for whom she wants to give up her comfortable upper-middle-class life in Nîmes. Captain Vidal was such a dominant presence that, for me, he took over Pan’s Labyrinth in a way that I couldn’t believe Guillermo del Toro intended. In Leaving Sergi López’s magnetism is very welcome – it’s all there is to enjoy and admire.
In one of the big rows between Suzanne and her husband Samuel she admits that ‘I hate myself for hurting you all but I can’t help it’. The remark makes no sense because the relationships within the family are glum and etiolated from the start: Catherine Corsini doesn’t take the trouble to create any vital texture that Suzanne’s affair can jeopardise or destroy. It’s impossible to believe her marriage to the gelid, dismissive Samuel was ever tolerable, let alone happy. Her teenage children David (Alexandre Vidal) and Marion (Daisy Broom) treat their mother with a contempt not much less dislikeable than the husband’s. When one evening Suzanne takes the chicken she’s just cooked from the oven and the others complain they had chicken for lunch too, Suzanne loses control and throws the roast, plate-smashingly, to the floor. This seems meant to show how wound up Suzanne is by her incipient feelings for Ivan. It’s actually a perfectly reasonable response to the family’s ill-mannered ingratitude. Suzanne and her children seem remote from one another until the blank-faced, shoulder-shrugging daughter works herself up into shrill opposition to the affair with Ivan, whereas the son turns heroically supportive of his mother. Suzanne appears to expect that support – she’s shocked when Marion withholds it. That assumption seems startlingly selfish but here too the script is evasive or just simple-minded: because Samuel is so vile, Suzanne is therefore a gallant victim, pure and simple.
If it weren’t for the fact that Leaving came out in France a few weeks before I Am Love was released in Italy, you might think Corsini was ripping off Luca Guadagnino’s much wittier film. It’s another ‘lady and the prole’ love story, as Samuel derisively describes his wife’s affair with Ivan at one point. The three main characters in the two movies have obvious similarities: the dignified, long-suffering wife; the coldly possessive husband; the artisanal lover. Like Emma Recchi and the young chef she falls for, Suzanne and Ivan eventually get their kit off en plein air, although the scene is nothing like as colourfully amusing as its counterpart in I Am Love. Elsewhere, the sex scenes in Leaving have a soft-porn vigour that’s enhanced by the unlikely spectacle of Kristin Scott Thomas taking part in them. The feministic flavour of Leaving is, however, insipid. It consists of little more than presenting Samuel, very crudely, as an appalling chauvinist, who seems to think Suzanne’s place is in the kitchen and who scoffs at her ambition to return to work: he actually says things like, ‘You are my wife and the mother of my children’. Samuel is a hospital doctor (shorthand for heartlessly clinical and convenient for the plot). Suzanne wants to resume her career as a physiotherapist (a profession which is given a softer, more healing connotation than her white-coated husband’s line of work). Samuel treats everyone shabbily – the builders as well as his wife – even before things start happening between Suzanne and Ivan. I didn’t notice him smile at any point at either of his children (although unsmilingness seems to be a family trait): Samuel’s face cracks only when he breaks down and cries at the news Suzanne is going to leave him. The moment isn’t either played or directed in a way that humanises him – it’s designed to show Samuel as snivellingly wretched as well as tyrannical. Needless to say, he’s a crudely insensitive performer in bed too. Yvan Attal performs his thankless role with grim conviction – this quality in the actor bleeds into the character and reinforces Samuel’s repellent personality.
The builder Rémi, for whom Ivan works, is eventually shown to have his price but Samuel is really the only male rotter in sight: it’s the son, not the daughter, who’s sympathetic to his mother’s new life and Samuel’s father, not his bitchy mother, who’s ready to encourage Suzanne to go back to work. I expect this will mean that Catherine Corsini is praised for being unpartisan although the characterisations of the parents-in-law, as of the children, are perfunctory, mechanical – because the director is so intent on demonising the husband. The construction of the story is especially primitive in dramatising the premise that Samuel’s actions and behaviour are responsible for those of his wife. Rémi (Bernard Blancan) is constructing a consulting room for Suzanne at the back of the couple’s home; Samuel wants the work done on the cheap. As a result of Suzanne’s inattention (we assume because he is already distracting her), Ivan breaks his ankle and finds himself in hospital with – small world – Samuel as his doctor. Ivan is desperate to be discharged so that he can visit his young daughter Berta (Berta Esquirol) in Spain. (Ivan’s split up from the girl’s mother and hasn’t seen Berta since his spell in prison.) Samuel agrees to allow this only when Suzanne suggests that she drives Ivan there and back. Corsini’s treatment of David – her lack of interest in following through the implications of his loyalty to Suzanne – seems humanly as well as dramatically negligent. It’s noticeable, for example, that David immediately hits it off with Berta yet his mother seems to take this for granted. And it seems surprising that suspicious Samuel doesn’t get a sniff that his son is, as Samuel would see it, betraying him. (Skint and desperate thanks to Samuel, Suzanne and Ivan ransack her house of its many and valuable works of art when the place is empty for the weekend. How does Samuel suppose they would have known when to call, except through David’s telling them?) Perhaps the most striking element of the plotting is that Samuel exploits his connections with various powers-that-be to destroy Suzanne’s and Ivan’s work prospects. This might seem, on the face of it, a shocking comment on local government corruption in southern France but it’s more likely just another instance of Corsini’s taking an easy and thoughtless option.
Although the fundamental problem with Leaving is a bad script, a better actress than Kristin Scott Thomas might have done more to rescue the situation. Cast regularly now in both English- and French-speaking movies, she’s become a distinctive figure in cinema. To British audiences who think a French film has an inherent touch of class, there’s probably a special appeal in the Gallicisation of a posh English actress. The French may think she always looked a cut above English language pictures. In I’ve Loved You So Long Scott Thomas played a French woman. Here she plays an English one, who went to France as an au pair and never left – another resonance with I Am Love, in which Tilda Swinton’s Emma grew up in Russia and was taken to Italy as a young bride. But, unlike Luca Guadagnino, Catherine Corsini makes nothing of this. It’s as if she’s using it as a pretext for the fact that Scott Thomas’s French, although it’s very good, is perceptibly not that of a native speaker. At the same time, Suzanne has a name that could be French, as if that will increase British cinemagoers’ enjoyment of Kristin Scott Thomas pretending to be French again.
She’s impregnably soignée: even when Samuel starts beating her up Suzanne doesn’t have a hair out of place. Scott Thomas’s spare delicacy – her elegantly defined gestures, the lack of any surplus flesh – creates a superficial impression of precision, and a misleading one: she lacks emotional accuracy as well as emotional range. We can see Suzanne’s in a state but rarely anything more specific than that (and Scott Thomas also lacks the sense of mystery that would compensate for this vagueness). She’s no more able than the script is willing to bring out the tensions in Suzanne’s situation. At the end, Suzanne shoots Samuel through the heart he doesn’t have, and no one could blame her. (The moment at which she appears suddenly to remember there’s a shotgun in the wardrobe is pretty funny.) As she’s reunited with Ivan in the same field where they made love earlier in the film, we hear police car sirens in the distance and I felt a pleasing sense of unintended symmetry between Leaving and Scott Thomas’s previous French hit. She doesn’t look like a recidivist but here she is, heading back to the life behind bars from which she emerged at the start of I’ve Loved You So Long.
20 July 2010