I've Loved You So Long
Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius, Laurent Grévill, Frédéric PierrotDirector: Philippe Claudel
Studio: Sony Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Running Time: 117 minutes
DVD Release: March 3rd 2009
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DVD Review
Juliette Fontaine (Kristin Scott Thomas, Golden Globe® Nominee for I've Loved You So Long, Oscar® nominee for The English Patient) is a frail, haunted woman, an ex-doctor who's a shell of her former self. Having served 15 years in prison for an unspeakable crime, she's back on the "outside." With nowhere else to go, she comes to live with her loving but estranged sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein). Together the sisters embark on a painful but redemptive journey back from life's darkest edge in this gripping drama of struggle and salvation.
User Reviews
Spare me your nuanced performances - Rating: 3/5
Let's be blunt: I don't care for characters who are turned in on themselves. And, frankly, I am a little suspicious of those who do.
So much has been said about what a great performance this is. IMO, you can not have a "great performance" in a role with a flat, uninteresting character and an emotional range from A to B. I am not criticizing Ms. Thomas's performance; I am sure it was highly competent. I am just not amused by spending the better part of two hours watching someone choke on her inner emotions, however nuanced. Movies like this might be redeemed, IMO, with voice-over. It works for Martin Scorsese; you'd think other filmmakers would give it a whirl.
As to my brooding suspicions, "nuanced" films attract the intellectually eager like honey draws flies. Sometimes it seems that the less that is visible on the screen, the more animated certain types are in declaring the brilliance of the performance. Taking oneself too seriously clouds the judgment. Everybody agree what a brilliant critic Pauline Kael was. A big part of her genius, I think, was that she didn't try too hard to find the art.
(I am not saying that a great turn on the screen necessarily require a lot of histrionics. I am only saying the character cannot be flat, however much she grimaces. A lot of drama happens to flat characters in real life; I just don't care to watch it.)
I've Watched You So Long - Rating: 2/5
Sometimes too much good taste is a bad thing. Despite its potentially melodramatic premise, "I've Loved You So Long" is restrained to a fault. There is little drama, just a gradual accumulation of moments depicted as tastefully as the domestic details of its bourgeois French setting. Tame, well-behaved scenes pile up like bric-a-brac. The movie is clearly intended to be a low-key chamber piece, but it errs too far in this direction and ends up muted and dull. By the time the script calls for Kristin Scott Thomas to turn up the heat just a bit, I had lost patience and was amusing myself by trying to translate backwards from the subtitles. I stopped watching about three quarters of the way through, when it began to telegraph a cop-out plot twist that drained the last few drops of interest from the story. "I've Loved You So Long" looks good on paper, but in practice is eminently forgettable.
Superb Duet - Rating: 5/5
Your reaction to this French film will depend entirely on your appreciation of acting, of the near-miraculous performances of Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein as sisters reunited after a calamity. I WILL NOT tell you anything more about the tale. Director Philippe Claudel doesn't want me to; his film is artfully structured to keep the viewer uninformed, perhaps even unwarned, of various facts. THERE ARE NO FLASHBACKS, and that in itself is refreshing in the context of the "cinema" of today. The performances of the two sister/actresses is so convincing, and the cinematography so crafty, that any reservations some reviewers have expressed about the plausibility of the plot need not be heeded. If Scott Thomas and Zylberstein were singers, and their acting were a Baroque duet by Handel, I'd hitchhike across Texas in tie-dye and love beads to hear them.
I suppose I might mention that this is a sad, sad story, not a piquant French comedy. My wife chose it, I was skeptical through the first ten minutes - until the background musak vanished - and then I began to believe in the characters.
Great at first, on second thought... - Rating: 3/5
This review will have spoilers, so you have been alerted!
I loved this movie until the very end, found it moving, real, etc., which I don't often do in French movies. Then I started thinking: HOW could nobody know about her son's illness? HOW could her husband have testified against her? HOW could her sister's friends, and her sister not have read about the case in the papers...so the movie does not stand up under even the lightest of scrutinies. Until I reached that realization, it was great. Kristen Scott Thomas is brilliant, absolutely, as are some of the other actors, but the story, so earnest, actually is hollow and ultimately silly.
Beautiful and touching story about love between sisters - Rating: 5/5
I need to watch a movie like this once in a while. Otherwise I might never cry. And crying is cathartic.
French cinema is about relationships. I wonder how it became so intensely about relationships in a way that no other national cinema is about relationships. I don't know. This one is about the relationship between sisters done in a way that I have never seen before. And that I like. I am so bored with reprises and remakes of themes, as good as they sometimes are. This is not about sisterhood politically. And thank you for that. It is about real sisterhood under confusing and difficult circumstances, when there is estrangement for very good reasons, yet there is love to overcome whatever it is that causes the distance.
In this case Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) has been released after 15 years in prison. Her younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) who always adored her and looked up to her takes her in. She has her own family, two adopted Vietnamese girls, a husband and a father who is old and can no longer speak. Naturally bringing Juliette into their household is risky. What has Juliette done and why? It is really unspeakable and yet Lea believes like all "bleeding hearts" that her sister is essentially good and whatever happened happened for a reason, and so do we in the audience. Kristin Scott Thomas plays this part of the film with a long, suffering face and the sort of resignation that comes with complete defeat. So we know. Whatever happened to her, whatever she did was forced upon her by the fates. What we don't know is exactly what that was.
I cannot say enough about the exquisite performances by both Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein. The direction by Philippe Claudel was, in the French manner, focused on people and who they are, done unobtrusively in the best invisible style in which the story and the characters are what we see without directorial distraction. We are lost in the story and the existential conflict between what we are and what is thought of us by others. We are caught between the appearance of life and the reality.
