Short story 'a success' at film fest
2005-09-05 13:24
Venice, Italy - French director Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle, a chilling and stylish treatment of a Joseph Conrad short story, has won enthusiastic approval from audiences at the Venice Film Festival, where it is competing for the Golden Lion.
Chereau's film examines the "muffled violence of a two-person civil war" with his study of the marriage of well-heeled Parisian couple with leading French actress Isabelle Huppert in the title role and Pascal Greggory as her husband Jean.
Huppert, who starred in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher in 2000, puts in a strong performance as a woman struggling to break free from the golden prison of a passionless marriage, making her a leading contender for the festival's best actress award.
They appear to represent the perfect couple. Approaching middle age, he is rich and their drawing room is filled regularly with dinner guests. One day, Gabrielle elopes, leaving a crushing letter for her husband. However, she returns within hours.
'I had an incredible feeling reading it'
Conrad's short-story The Return, set in Paris in 1912, inspired Chereau's 10th film in 30 years, though Gabrielle is the first to be shown in Venice.
"I read the short story by Conrad and I had an incredible feeling reading it, I simply tried to transmit that feeling," said Chereau, who directed the controversial 2001 Berlin Golden Bear winner Intimacy.
He said in Venice that he wanted to make a film about "people who we can understand, who have the same lives as us, and who are confronted with this absence of desire, to the point where they have quite simply forgotten that they have a body."
For Chereau, Gabrielle shows her indomitable strength and the aridity of her marriage in a single, enigmatic line delivered later in the film: "Had I known that you loved me, I'd never have come back."
Unusually for prominent French directors and actresses, Chereau and Huppert have never worked together before. "We'd been in contact for some time. I couldn't find a project for her, but reading the short story, I thought of Isabelle for the part."
Original music by Favio Vacchi rachets up the tension throughout the movie, which has a few notable stylistic tics. Chereau mixes scenes shot in black-and-white with colour, and at times emphasises particularly dramatic moments by reverting to the age of the silent movie with the use of dialogue cards.
The role of the husband fascinated the director: Jean was "touching in his fragility. A man who was so sure of himself, but who understands nothing. Who has never understood, especially who this woman was."