Quality art-house material where style overrides content.

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2004)

A French woman loses her famous conductor husband and young daughter to a car accident and has to build her life afresh.
One of these films that has nothing really new or original to offer but gets high IMDB marks because it is an emotion wrangler and has the quiet (almost silent!) appeal of Juliet Binoche in the lead role.
(In competitive diving they have a tariff system which takes away marks for easier dives. This is an easier dive, but that doesn't mean the dive isn't excellently performed. I would take a whole point of the IMDB score under any such system!)
While I admire cinematography and symbolism in movies I believe these are the support structures to the story. Here they push the story to one side and take over - to the point where there is often nothing but mood, posture and music.
A move dedicated to grief and re-building is hardly going to be a laugh a minute, but Binoche wants to be frosty and controlled through the vast majority of this short (for a main feature) movie. Sorry, people don't grieve like that in real life - it is more a rollercoaster of emotions.
We know so little about this now-ended relationship. How was she before the accident? How did they really interact? Was it really a happy relationship? We know that her husband was no angel - but how do we know this wasn't known to JB? A checklist of questions is not what I want in a movie that exclusively takes on one woman's life experience in such close up.
Thankfully the final message is positive - life can be rebuilt. Wounds do heal. You can move on from tragedy.
Here is a movie that may leave you entertained and moved, but it is far from a voyage of factual discovery unless you are an expert on body language and mind reading. Maybe there should be subtitles for this too?