Critic Reviews

Cotillard’s performance is luminous throughout, enriching the willful heroine with the depth of a single obsession.

The ingredients of an old-fashioned romantic weepie are given class and conviction by director Nicole Garcia whose elegant restraint helps to ground the more fanciful elements in some sense of reality. Her approach also makes the eleventh hour revelations easier to swallow.

A melodrama with an interesting trick in its tail, but I don’t think that director Garcia pulls the trick off as well as she might have. The movie is sumptuously shot by Christophe Beaucarne; every frame is robustly picturesque. But the story could have used a little less “Under the Tuscan Sun” and a little more “All That Heaven Allows.”

The result, despite an uncertain start, is in the end a surprisingly intriguing and affecting movie.

The film could be shorter and perhaps more logical, and as the soap opera drama builds, the timeline becomes muddled. Still, there’s something pleasantly old-fashioned about its commitment to grandiose emotion.

Still, the thing is almost watchable until a ridiculous reveal spoils whatever chances this film had at succeeding.

Garcia never gets a grasp on her protagonist’s contradictions, or those of her story — certainly not enough to pull off the movie’s jaw-dropper of a twist. But she conjures a powerful sensuality, and Cotillard burns ferociously bright, even when the center does not hold.

Cotillard, whose face is often painted in chiaroscuro care of cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, manages to provide a gravitas and slightly colored deviations from what is otherwise a monochrome character.

The film takes on Gabrielle’s listlessness, slumps into an opiated fug. The malady is mysterious and not easily treatable. It just exhausts you. It transforms from a story about release to just another jail. At times it felt like there was no escape.

Of course, Cotillard is your first call if you want an actress to suffer exquisitely, but the issue is her character Gabrielle is essentially a nightmare of self-involvement, whose emotional torture is very difficult to get invested in since she herself has already bought all the shares.