Half-Assed Movie Reviews

January 6, 2009:  I’ve Loved You So Long

I went out to see I’ve Loved You So Long during that January period in which I’m trying to make my best stab at Oscar contenders, before the nominations are actually announced, to hopefully reduce my “workload” in February.  This one had a lot of buzz over Kristin Scott Thomas’ performance, so it was a no-brainer to catch it while it was in the theatres.  As it turns out, there was no Oscar nomination, but I’m still glad I saw it.

I’ve been familiar with Kristin Scott Thomas for quite a while now – I suppose from as far back as Bitter Moon (1992), a Roman Polanski film which I enjoyed some years before the much higher-profile Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Best Picture winner The English Patient (1996) really brought Thomas into the spotlight (and got her an Oscar nomination for the latter).  Since the mid-1990s she has bounced around and seems to have had the flexibility to do lots of stuff she wanted to do.  Her resurgence in the French-language Tell No One (2006) has brought her back to the forefront and here she headlines another French-language feature, I’ve Loved You So Long.

Thomas plays a woman, Juliette, reunited with her sister after 15 years, as she temporarily stays with her sister’s family and we explore the tensions as the two get to know one another again.  At the same time, the sister’s husband and young daughter struggle to figure out where they fit into the picture – more precisely, why they don’t seem to fit as well anymore into their own home.  To say much more about the plot would damage the flow of the film for those who haven’t seen it, and since this was a limited-release foreign language title, I have to assume that most Half-Assed Movie Reviews readers have not yet seen it.

There’s a lot to like about this movie.  It is honest about some real human needs, in a way that not all stories are comfortable being, and takes its time in order to emphasize the fact that things don’t always happen as quickly and neatly as we’re used to seeing in the movies.  Much has been said about Thomas’ ability to convey a huge range of emotions and say so much with her wide eyes and trembling silence – she’s a woman of few words for much of the film – and it’s a performance which certainly might have seen an Oscar nomination if it had been more heavily promoted.  Also, there is real potential for missteps in the plot, and I had to cringe a few times as it looked like we were going to see things slip into cliched movie devices, but in the end there was only one really unforgivable episode (a character ingratiating themself to another through selfless action in an emergency, as if that would forever erase all tension there was between the two of them before).  As I always say when plowing through movies in Oscar season, the awards don’t necessarily mean what they purport to mean, but it does result in me watching generally above-average films for a couple of months of the year.  The faithful reader will eventually see the train wreck of my usual March/April Oscar backlash as I deliberately skew far in the opposite direction for a while.  Classic horror, Judd Apatow, 1990s indie stuff and a few choice picks from the 1980s are on the slate.

But back to I’ve Loved You So Long.  Is all the magnificence of this film carried through to its conclusion?  Unfortunately not.  I have trouble blaming the filmmakers, though, because I’m torn about it myself.  They are trying to give me what I want, and I don’t know what I want, so how could they possibly get it right?  What happens in the end is that pretty much every detail of the story comes out.  The pacing up to that point had relied with good effect on the fact that the audience doesn’t know everything.  Leaving major pieces of the puzzle unrevealed would have resulted in a very different film, and when watching this type of file I always find myself wanting resolution – wanting to know what actually happened.  The full explanation, however, once it comes out, actually defuses the whole core of the story for me, and I found it to be a real let-down.

Not everyone will be disappointed with this ending.  Everyone comes to a film with their own expectation of what they want to know and what they don’t want to know.  The filmmakers didn’t match with me in this case.