Un poison violent

Katell Quillévéré  (2010)

Love Like Poison is about the tensions between religion and carnality.  Not a new theme but this first feature – Katell Quillévéré also wrote the screenplay, with Mariette Désert – combines emotional texture and detail with such skilful concentration that the material feels freshly realised.  The contest between moral obligation and sexual desire is focused chiefly on fourteen-year-old Anna (Clara Augarde), who’s home, from boarding school, in the Brittany village where her family lives and where Anna is preparing for her confirmation in the Catholic Church.  But the contest is taking place too in the lives of the most important adults in her world:  her churchgoing mother Jeanne (Lio); her non-believer father Paul (Thierry Neuvic), who’s having an affair and has recently moved out of the family home; his bedridden father Jean (Michel Galabru), who still lives there; the parish priest Père François (Stefano Cassetti).   Although he’s in the church choir, there isn’t much conflict of this kind in the mind of the fresh-faced Pierre (Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil):  a little younger than Anna, he’s increasingly curious about her body (as she, more self-consciously, is about his) but he’s blithely unspiritual.  Yet each of the other principal characters – although some of them share Pierre’s godlessness – is troubled by sexual needs of one kind or another.   When Anna is washing her grandfather, he says smilingly, ‘I feel handsome’:  she’s shocked to realise there’s an erection under his pyjama trousers, and he’s sorry he’s shocked her.  Her father is certainly debonair compared with Anna’s hyper-tense mother but Paul’s shadow movements and eyes give away his guilty conscience.  (A scene between father and daughter on the beach is perfectly played; it makes Paul’s brittle emotionality in later scenes all the more startling.)  As for Jeanne, it’s clear she’s attracted to Père François as more than a spiritual comforter.

All the actors concerned are excellent and comparing the various pairs in this sextet is continuously interesting but it seemed to me that, apart from Anna, the most important, and certainly the most powerful, character was the priest.   Anna, developing physically and sexually, is already growing out of God.  Père François – an Italian by birth (Jeanne helped him learn French when he first came to Brittany) – is poised between two worlds.  In the early stages of the film, his religious vocation looks to be a fact of life:  it never ceases to be unignorable but François’s psychology is revealed to be more complicated.  You first sense that part of him would prefer to live entirely in the present when he’s persuaded to kick a football around with the local boys.  It’s typical of Katell Quillévéré’s attention to detail that she dresses François in increasingly casual clothes as the film progresses.  Like his clerical garb, his thick-lensed, steel-framed spectacles create a superficial impression of moral austerity, even humourlessness, but the vivid light blue eyes behind them impose themselves more and more.   Under Quillévéré’s sympathetic direction, Stefano Cassetti gives a superbly subtle performance.  His carefully affectionate gesture when he consoles Anna in one scene anticipates the much more difficult act of self-control required of him in a later one with Jeanne:  both are beautifully judged.  It’s when we see the skull-faced, desiccated bishop who conducts the confirmation service – using the words of St Paul to inveigh against sexuality, watched by the uncertain, sensually vital faces of the children being confirmed – that we fully realise the dual nature of Père François.

Attending the funeral of Pierre’s grandmother early in the film, Anna faints as the coffin is lowered into the ground and Père François recites the hope of resurrection.  She does the same when confronted by the bishop, just as he’s about to confirm her.  These rare moments of melodrama are cleverly placed:  they make Love Like Poison more eventful; and they’re convincing because they may (or may not) be willed by the girl.  Anna is almost precociously well developed for her age: she already has largish breasts.  (In a conversation with her mother, Anna asks what sort of breasts her father likes and Jeanne replies, with a quietly bitter mixture of ruefulness and assertiveness, ‘Breasts like mine – or that’s what he said once’.)  Although she’s emotionally confused and vulnerable, Anna’s intellectual equipment is pretty advanced too (believably so).  As she starts to get some distance from her Catholic obligations, she behaves with growing, shrewd daring.   After the debacle of the confirmation service, she goes to her grandfather’s room in the middle of the night and lifts her nightdress.   He dies shortly afterwards – we assume a happy man, not just because of this but because he’s no longer parted from his late, beloved wife.  At his funeral, Anna reads a piece in his memory, a counterpoint to the bishop’s reading from Galatians.  It’s from the Song of Songs – erotic but, as Anna realises, irreproachable since it’s from the Bible.

The film takes its (French) title from a Serge Gainsbourg song but the music for the most part, although this is an unusual and eclectic soundtrack, isn’t its most successful aspect.   A tenor (verging on countertenor) voice sings ‘Greensleeves’, etc.  Children perform songs in church choir arrangements (including a Radiohead number over the closing credits).    Of course, these pick up Quillévéré’s themes of innocence on the cusp of sexuality and denatured maleness but they do so too neatly and artfully.  This is a minor criticism, though – one that certainly doesn’t carry much weight beside Clara Augarde’s blend of radiance and truculence as Anna.  Katell Quillévéré directs her sensitively so that we’re always conscious of the fine balance between self-awareness and innocence in Anna – and in the young actress playing her.

15 May 2011