Marguerite & Julien

The operatic tragedy of Marguerite and Julien's plight proves an effectively creepy dramatic engine.

Demoustier is charismatic enough to almost help Donzelli pull it off, but Elkaïm is so stiff as Julien you never understand why Marguerite is willing to risk her life in the first place.

It’s somehow both mannered and style-less, fantastical and under-imagined—perversely watchable, in other words.

As fate closes in on the lovers, the silliness of their own behaviour and Marguerite & Julien in general prevents any pathos from entering the scene. The taboo of incest never troubles as one never truly believe that they are brother and sister - or in love - or anything else.

The film is a painfully silly, laughably naive Romance with a capital “R.”

It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.

The excruciating experience of Marguerite & Julien need only be endured by viewers with an obsessive interest in the least constructive aesthetic currents in contemporary French cinema.