Je l'aimais (2009) Reviews

• Beautiful film

  bob9982011-06-21

  A film about an illicit affair: how many hundreds of them can there be? Zabou Breitman has made one that engages the viewer's sympathy throughout. The bourgeois family that seeks to avoid conflicts in order to preserve appearances, then finds the facade is crumbling is well described. It's so important to Pierre and Suzanne that they keep their houses and cars, that the merchants they deal with don't suspect anything is amiss. Daniel Auteuil is really effective as the unhappy lover; he made me think of Jean Desailly in Truffaut's great La peau douce as he tries to keep wife and mistress both happy. Those sad eyes will give him away. Marie-Josee Croze is moving into deeper, more intense roles and she is very moving as she tries to work out her allegiances. Florence Loiret Caille as the abandoned daughter-in-law seems out of her range.

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• Someone I Admire

  writers_reign2010-11-24

  It can't be too much fun being Zabu Breitman. This slim, female Orson Welles very possibly wakes each morning with the knowledge that she is unlikely to even equal let alone eclipse her very first film as a director, the exquisite Se Souvenirs des belles choses which has to be, no contest, one of the all-time great directing debuts, male or female any nationality. On the credit side unlike Welles she did not immediately become persona non grata in the Producer/Financier set which means she is still able to get funding to turn out excellent films like Someone I Loved (though the cynic in me suspects that in return for Japanese backing she had to agree to a certain amount of location shooting in Hong Kong, else why feature the city when anywhere would have sufficed). It's a typically French gentle story of love and regret acted superbly by all four main characters. At the start Daniel Auteuil drives out of Paris with a woman who could well be his daughter and two children. They drive to a second home in the country and settle in for a long stay. It turns out that the woman is Auteuil's daughter-in-law, who has been dumped without discussion by her husband and his so. We then get to the heart of the film as Auteuil tells her how he, as a married man and father, fell hopelessly in love whilst on a business trip to Hong Kong. The woman in question was the French-born translator and was undoubtedly the love of his life. The affair lasted for several years but he opted to remain with his wife rather than follow his heart. And that's it, folks, but what a story and what a story teller is Zabou. Outstanding.

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