Photo by Thierry Valletoux/Sony Pictures Classics
Kristin Scott Thomas stars in the French film "I've Loved You So Long," now showing at Malco's Studio on the Square.
Some three weeks before its DVD debut and some three months after hopeful Sony Pictures Classics representatives screened the movie for Memphis critics, "I've Loved You So Long" limps into Malco's Studio on the Square as a sort of battle-scarred awards-season underachiever.
Photo by Thierry Valletoux/Sony Pictures Classics
Kristin Scott Thomas stars in the French film "I've Loved You So Long," now showing at Malco's Studio on the Square.
Kristin Scott Thomas, whose fierce, smart performance anchors the film, was touted early as a likely (and deserving) Best Actress Oscar contender. She did earn a Golden Globe nomination, but few critics groups singled her out for honors, and her movie failed to gain any real traction.
Not to be confused with the 2 Live Crew's most famous sampled chorus hook ("Me love you long time"), "I've Loved You So Long" casts Thomas as the somewhat cold and mysterious Juliette Fontaine, who arrives at the loving, noisy home of her university professor sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), after 15 years in prison.
Ensconced in what is jokingly referred to as a "palace" in Northeast France, Léa's "real Benetton family" includes a soccer-loving husband, a pair of adopted Vietnamese daughters and a silent but "adorable" stroke-afflicted grandfather. This group might be found in a Hollywood production, but only in a French film ("I've Loved You So Long" is in French, with English subtitles) would a couple debate whether to see a Kurosawa movie or a revival of Ernst Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner" at a local theater. Probably only in France would the possibility of such choices be believable. (And only in a French film would a character at a dinner party declare "Rohmer is the new Racine," as blithely as if he were saying, "Pass the peas.")
In "I've Loved You So Long," Scott Thomas' forceful and familiar patrician cheekbones and Roman nose are offset by a wan expression and hollow eyes. As the movie peels away the layers of Juliette's past to reveal the source of this sadness, writer-director Philippe Claudel asks us to have compassion for a person we typically would condemn for an unforgivable crime. The ending, however, is a cop-out that sabotages everything that came before: It lets the audience off the hook while congratulating it for its empathy. What seemed bold becomes mundane, leaving us with a movie worth seeing for its performances more than for its intriguing but compromised themes.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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