Review by Doug Cooper
Stars Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Hughes Anglade, Xavier Beauvois,
Maya Sansa, Clara Bindi, Viviana Aliberti, Michelle Marquais,
Peter Arens, Ignazio Oliva, Jean Coulon
Written by Benoit Jacquot & Julien Boivent
Certification UK PG
Runtime 94 minutes
Directed by Benoit Jacquot
Isabelle Huppert never appears to stop working. She's constantly busy and, by the end of the year, will have starred in four movies along with an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Doesn't she ever take a holiday?
Her latest effort is a moody subtitled drama giving full vent to her glacial poise and sophisticated beauty. She plays Ann, a musician with a rather melodramatic line in dealing with her husband's infidelity. She spots him snogging a woman one evening and immediately severs their partnership. Not only that, but she goes about selling their home and all its furniture and contents in the space of one week while he is away working. She then embarks on voyage of personal discovery – hooking up with an old flame and then deciding to journey to Italy for a lifestyle change, staying in a dilapidated villa in Ischia, embracing the languid splendour of an unspoiled island.
The isolation is a welcome tonic for her, and one day while out swimming, she is "rescued" by a young couple who think her inert body in the sea in a possible corpse. She is woken from her torpor and agrees to go for dinner with them, and then indulges in an innocently sapphic affair with the attractive girl (Sansa) who then stays at the villa with her. Don't get any seamy ideas though. No naughtiness is ever shown. It's more a quietly subdued character piece examining Ann's state of mind along with her liberation. Huppert is always watchable and her journey exerts a slow but seductive hold. Wouldn't we all like to spend an idyll in a secluded place like this at some point?
It's a slow burner of a drama, taking its patient time in drawing you in with a mature resonance about it, a sly intelligence that keeps you engaged amid the longueurs. It makes no great impression overall to be honest, but is nevertheless unassumedly satisfying in a leisurely paced style. Not bad at all.