Il y a longtemps que je t’aime

Philippe Claudel (2008)

Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) is released from prison and invited to stay, until she’s found her feet, by the younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) from whom she’s been estranged for the 15 years she’s been inside.   For the first 20 minutes or so we wonder what the crime was – or at least whom Juliette murdered.  We find out it was her child; for most of the remaining 90 minutes, we wonder how and why the killing occurred.   The film is slow-moving and lacks momentum but the writer-director Philippe Claudel times and places the revelations so that they have enough charge to keep the audience going until the next one.  (Or most of the audience:  a packed Richmond Filmhouse was so predictably quiet and attentive to a film starring Kristin Scott Thomas in a ‘civilised’ French setting that I could hear (discreet) snoring at one point.)  The technique of artificially withholding information in this way is tiresomely familiar in psychological drama and the revelations here are few anyway:  the film is suspenseful only to the extent that you soon know the crucial explanation will be delayed as long as possible.   I’ve Loved You So Long (words from a remembered-from-childhood song the two sisters sing at the piano) is fundamentally a cheat.  The news that Juliette, a physician in her former life, murdered her six-year-old son has an inevitable charge (she admits it during a job interview – which the admission brings to an abrupt end) and it’s the film’s hook.  How will this mother infanticide build relationships, be received among family and friends who are, without exception, highly educated, liberal-minded professionals?   But apart from the man at the interview, there seems to be no one who finds out about the nature of the crime in the course of the film:  Léa, her husband Luc (and presumably her father-in-law, deprived of speech by a stroke) and the professionals Juliette meets with – social worker, parole officer – are in the know from the start.  She might as well have killed her husband or a stranger for all the difference her crime makes to most of her interactions with the outside world.

Kristin Scott Thomas wouldn’t be the first actress you’d cast as an axe murderer and any hopes that Claudel will challenge the audience by making the character of Juliette disturbing or even dislikeable are disappointed.   (What’s infuriating is that some people will satisfy themselves that, in watching the film, they’ve seen something challenging because of the ostensible subject matter – regardless of the actual treatment of the subject.)    You sense not only the audience’s incredulity that such a fragrantly sensitive creature could have committed what to many people is the most absolutely unacceptable of all crimes – but also a complacent confidence that there must be a reasonable and reassuring explanation.   And there is:   it turns out that Juliette is not only not a malefactor; her motives for ending her son’s life make her more courageously admirable than most non-murderers could hope to be.   Scott Thomas’s characterisation is very consistent but she fastens it tightly to a single idea (which Juliette articulates in her eventual account of what happened) – that, for a mother, a child’s death is so devastating that all that follows is a pale afterlife or a ‘life sentence’.  (This phrase is very familiar:  we’ve often heard it spoken by the parents of children killed by strangers – when they rage at the early release or prospect of release of the murderer.)  It’s a scrupulous but monotonous performance:  Juliette’s being in mourning for her life and her shut-off quality are too apparent.  You can understand why, the day after Juliette’s release, the elder of Léa’s two adopted Vietnamese daughters, says to Léa that Juliette seems a bit weird.  It’s less believable that Léa and Luc introduce the magnetically detached Juliette into their social world so soon (the effect of her not wearing make up is to make Scott Thomas’s face even more remarkably beautiful than usual).   Scott Thomas is at her best in scenes with Léa’s children; Juliette obviously loves being with them but is holding herself back – there’s a good ambiguity as to whether this is because, having lost a child, she can’t fully enjoy herself in the company of children, or whether she’s aware of what Léa may be thinking seeing her with the children.  What Scott Thomas doesn’t project, however, is anything to make you feel uneasy that the children might not be safe with her.

Elsa Zylberstein is more physically protean; she sometimes looks plain, sometimes very pretty (she really lights up when she smiles).   She has something of Scott Thomas’s easy elegance and they match up convincingly as sisters.   But Léa, an academic, is in many respects a thankless (and poorly conceived) role.   It’s puzzling throughout as to why she’s incurious about the circumstances of her nephew’s murder yet there’s no suggestion that she doesn’t want to know; when Juliette finally explains to her what happened, it’s incredible that the case wasn’t public knowledge or why Léa – a teenager at the time – wouldn’t have known about it.   Léa appears to be in a happy marriage although, whenever it suits Claudel’s immediate purposes, she and Luc don’t seem to talk much:  it’s after Juliette’s arrival that he asks how long she’ll be staying and Lea replies:  ‘A few weeks, a few months – do you mind?’.  Even after they’ve argued at home about Juliette, Léa and Luc go out for the evening and she seems astonished that he gets worked up by the news that Juliette is babysitting.    Most bizarre of all is the fact that they’ve chosen to adopt rather than have their own children – Léa explains to Juliette this isn’t because of any physical problem but because of Juliette; this extraordinary decision seems not to have caused a whisper of tension in the marriage.  We get no sense either of what the truth of Juliette’s crime makes Léa feel about not having children of her own.   Perhaps Claudel has decided by this point to pretend he never raised this florid idea, which is either nonsensical or very worrying:  if Léa was neurotically fearful that she might follow in Juliette’s childkiller footsteps, how is the problem solved by adopting children instead of giving birth?

I’ve Loved You So Long is meticulously, tastefully glum.  The colour scheme is predominantly washed-out blues, greys, beiges.   It’s the sort of film when the appearance of a seemingly positive, likeable character makes you fear for his safety:  sure enough, Juliette’s affable parole officer (Frédéric Pierrot) eventually commits suicide.   The adoption business is one of several elements not followed through, rejected either for the sake of convenience or because they don’t add up, or both.  Juliette sits with Luc’s father and it looks as if she may start unburdening herself to him, secure in the knowledge that he can’t talk back (although he can write).  The scene doesn’t get anywhere and doesn’t recur.   Luc is a researcher in lexicology; we hear at the start that the research is going slowly but the character isn’t properly clarified or developed.  Is Luc a layabout who prefers playing and watching sport to his day job or is it just that it’s easier to write scenes for a charmingly immature soccer fan than for a lexicologist?   (Serge Hazanavicius does well in the part, even so – his boyishness and ease with the children contrasts well with Juliette’s bleak spirit.)  Claudel, born in 1962, is a professor of literature at the University of Lyon and a prize-winning novelist.   This is the first film he has directed for the cinema but he has a well-developed instinct for gliding over key omissions and cutting straight to the striking theatrical payoff.     We learn at an early stage that Juliette’s parents disowned her completely when she went to prison.  Her French father is now dead; her British mother, losing her mind, is in an old people’s home.  The scene in which Léa persuades Juliette to visit the mother would be an interesting one to have seen but probably a difficult one to write;  instead, we just get the visit – with the mother recognising Juliette but mistaking her for her childhood self and embracing her warmly.  Claudel saddles Elsa Zylberstein with an impossible challenge when Léa loses control in a seminar discussion with her students about what Dostoyevsky is saying about murder and murderers in Crime and Punishment:  the director can’t be bothered to build up to this, he just wants the outburst.    Claudel also seems to think (it’s a French tradition) that having people drift round art galleries or argue about books or films, whether in the classroom or round the dinner table, is a way of giving depth to the characters.   There’s one scene where this chatter leads to something dramatically more penetrating:   Léa, Luc and Juliette go to a dinner party, one of whom gets drunk and goads ‘la mystérieuse Juliette’ into saying where she’s been all these years.   (She could certainly be forgiven for ending the life of this individual.)   She says she’s been in prison for murder (she doesn’t say for killing her son) and the guests all laugh in admiration at this witty way of shutting up the tedious verbal bully at the head of the table.   Apart from Léa and Luc, only Michel (one of Lea’s colleagues and, from the start, attracted to Juliette) perceives that she’s telling the truth.  It’s an effective moment, but one which Claudel spoils by then having Michel (Laurent Grévill) join Juliette in the garden and say to her, ‘Everyone thought you were joking – except me’.

4 October 2008