Lots of non-English-speaking actors make the move to English-language roles, but Kristin-Scott Thomas has found success going in the other direction. The English actress is excellent in a supporting role in this year’s Nowhere Boy, but her most-acclaimed recent role has been as an ex-convict in the French film I’ve Loved You So Long. (She’s also done other movies there.) She plays another morally compromised character in this psychological drama.
The story begins with her rising from her marital bed in the dark, then (apparently) firing a shot. It then reverts to six months earlier, but that beginning portends the darker direction in which things will turn. Scott Thomas plays a housewife planning to return to work, and Sergi López (Pan’s Labyrinth, With a Friend Like Harry) plays the laborer helping to renovate her house, and with whom she unexpectedly finds herself spending time. Their relationship develops in perfunctory fashion, but the film is not about that so much as the depths to which she—and her doctor husband (Yvan Attal)—will go in the name of love, or maybe passion. Arguably, neither the beginning—the suddenly arising feelings—or the end, where we find out what that shot was about, are entirely convincing. And some viewers may not want to follow the disloyal housewife, but it is the morally ambiguous conduct of all parties that fascinates.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/6/10
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