Disengaging

Rating: Null/10 (3 May 2008)

A woman (Juliette Binoche) survives a car crash which kills here husband and child. Her life wrecked, she sells up and withdraws from life. Fortunately she is extremely wealthy  her husband was a world famous composer - in fact we are led to believe she wrote his stuff for him. This had me groaning - the woman's existence is on such impossibly ethereal plane that it undermines the emotional core of the film - the old problem of watching someone suffering who has less excuse for suffering than most. Far more tragic, surely, if they had been struggling and she had been left penniless, but then, Kieslowski is clearly only interested in dealing with refined, precious people - even his Dekalog series dealt mainly with doctors, lawyers, professors and suchlike  it's probably significant that my favourite episode deals with a taxi driver (though not the murdered one). As a result of the socio-economic distancing, Binoche's post-crash trauma is too indulgent, too minutely detailed, too drawn out. The sterile affair she then has with her husband's associate seems predictable, and the salvation achieved in the latter part of the film when she takes to working on the music is only banal.
There are some nice things here though. The sense of throwing everything up and withdrawing from the world ("I have only one thing left to do. Nothing.") is something rare and valuable in film. The scene with the rats nest is memorable  it was perhaps the moment in which we can relate to her most. But on the whole, Binoche's character is a priggish, hard-headed, snooty bore, too willful and self-controlled, too wealthy and too preternaturally talented to be of much interest. No doubt Kieslowski was chummy with world famous composers who live in country mansions the size of small citadels and who have wives as tasty and accomplished as Juliette Binoche. The rest of us have to put up with real world.