I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG

It’s scandalous to know that Kristin Scott Thomas didn’t even get an Oscar nomination for French writer Philippe Claudel’s debut film I’ve Loved You So Long. Not that the Oscars are any measure of greatness. For, a finer portrait of anguish and fortitude one hasn’t seen on screen, and that in a character who seems utterly irredeemable. When the film opens, Juliette is nervously smoking away in an empty airport lounge. Her sad, listless eyes, creased forehead and fidgety body language suggest suffering. On the other side of the glass is her sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein, an equal foil) fumbling out of her car and rushing in to receive her. Juliette has just been released from a 15-year prison sentence for murdering her little son; social services called her sister, and Lea decided to have her over at her home in the town of Nancy, where she teaches literature and lives with her doting husband Luc and two adopted daughters. For Juliette, it’s a long journey back amongst the living, a rigorous process of re-humanisation she must undergo, often without feeling the need for it. For Lea, it’s a tentative rediscovery of the sister she’d always looked up to, and sorely missed through the period when her very existence was erased from her life.

I loved the way Juliette looks at the world around her -– with the eyes of an outsider who doesn’t make much of the charade of everyday life. It’s not contempt or indifference, just the knowledge that it’s all so delicately balanced because there’s always an air of mistrust around her. And it’s so palpable, the narrative takes on the tone of a mystery as we view her every action with the same suspicion that everyone around her (with the notable exception of Lea) harbours about her motives. (This may well be the entire point of the film -- how human beings perceive social aberrants and constantly judge one another.) Besides, physical freedom really doesn’t mean much to her battered soul. Her arrival throws Lea’s life into a tizzy –- with Luc disapproving Juliette’s presence around their daughters, her older child posing awkward questions that nobody wants to answer and a social circle simmering with curiosity about Lea’s mysterious sister. Lea is a bundle of nervous energy trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy, while herself eager to know what drove Juilette to commit the heinous crime. As the film progresses, you realise her need for her sister’s love is as acute as her desire to gently reassure her.

This is one of those films where every sentence and gesture is loaded, characters rarely speak their mind and what’s left unsaid is very unsettling. Claudel juxtaposes Juliette’s spiritual incarceration with other characters in the normal world who are equally trapped -– her demented, institutionalised mother who once disowned her, her edgy parole officer starved for company, Lea’s father-in-law struck silent by a stroke and lost in the world of books and her colleague Michel, a widower who carefully guards his past. Juliette tries to keep a detached distance from her new environment, but is gradually drawn out of her shell and tentatively starts building new bridges. In the end the writer/director offers her redemption (on a platter it may seem; to me, it isn’t really the point), but although love and understanding help, we know that she won’t ever properly fix her broken heart.

Claudel keeps a tight control on his screenplay with scraps of information carefully scattered for maximum impact. He uses the camera to scan the inner landscapes of his characters with savage transparency. Scott Thomas loses herself in a role that becomes her so perfectly, it’s impossible to tell them apart. It’s a face that’ll haunt you for days. And a film you can’t easily forget.

Deepa Deosthalee