La vie promise

The story here is a little bit specious and even cloying at times. Isabelle Huppert plays Sylvia, a druggie prostitute who seems to care only about her booze and pills. She plies her trade on the streets of Nice. Her 14-year-old daughter, Laurence (Maud Forget) appears out of nowhere, having run away from her foster home. Sylvia tells her to get lost. She doesn't, and in the next scene, trying to protect her mother from a couple of pimps who are starting to beat her up for some money, the 14-year-old somehow stabs one of them. The other runs out the door. The stabbed man is dead, and mother and daughter are on the run as in a Hollywood on the lam movie.

I don't think I need to tell the reader that mom is going to find the love she really feels for her daughter in addition to finding her own heart, and so I won't, because it isn't that simple. The story though is rather ordinary and predictable and is told with a number of loose ends just left lying about, not the least of which is the dead man.

No matter however because: (1) Isabelle Huppert is brilliant and very convincing as a low-class, trashy kind of person who lies almost habitually, even when she doesn't need to, a person lacking social skills or really any kind of skill. Her hair is too too blonde and she dresses like a tramp.

But it is amazing how comfortable Huppert looks in the role. Again I am very much impressed with her ability. I wonder if there is a more talented actress working anywhere in the world today. She is almost obsessive in the way she becomes the characters she plays. I've seen her in half a dozen films and in everyone she was a distinctly different person.

(2) The movie is beautifully shot with arresting scenes of earth and sky, unlike anything one usually sees in a domestic French movie.

(3) The music, some of it American country and western, some of it classical, was wonderfully chosen and coordinated with the story of the film in a way that enhances our appreciation. That is what is usually attempted of course. The idea being that music should help to trigger our response; but often the attempt is only halfhearted or too obviously directive. Here the music helps to bring the film to life.

(4) The story is uplifting and redemptive.

One more thing: the title in English, The Promise Life, is not a good translation of what is intended by the French, La Vie Promise. Better would be "The Promised Life," although that would be inaccurate. Also unsatisfactory would be "The Life of Promise." What I like is the title sometimes given to the film, "Ghost River." There is a beautiful line in the film that refers to "The flow of the ghost river" that I think somehow illustrates the life Sylvia has lead.

By all means see this beautiful if somewhat sentimental film for Isabelle Huppert, one of the great stars of the modern cinema.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

In a recent interview, Dustin Hoffman (Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium) was talking about his upcoming film, Last Chance Harvey. He described it as "the kind of film that has been coming out for years in France...We don't believe in middle-aged love stories." Why wait for Hoffman's film next year, when you can see the amazing Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, The Bedroom Window), who was an incredible looking 49 when she made this film.

OK, a slowly unfolding relationship between Huppert and Pascal Greggory, the same age, doesn't appeal to you. You would rather drool over Keira Knightley, Emily Blunt, Ellen Page or Megan Fox. But, to dismiss one of the truly great actresses of our time would be a mistake.

Like many, I love on-the-edge-of-your-seat action and dazzling special effects, but there are time when I just want to sit back with a special beverage and let beautiful cinematography, soothing music, and brilliant acting slowing wash over me. Olivier Dahan's (La Vie en rose, Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse) film fits the bill perfectly.

This movie is held upright by the acting work of the main characters. Especially Isabelle Huppert exceeds herself once again, in portraying a weird persona , not the first time she achieved this. She is unsurpassable in acting out emotional developments within a story. Her meeting with her small son, she did not see for years, towards the end of the story, is gripping. It is not often cinema brings tears to me... Pascal Gregory is better than many middle of the road Hollywood actors, we see every night on TV (commercial TV in Holland at least). Our minds having been spoiled by too many cheap US products, thanks to TV, this French film is refreshing in its camera shooting. After so many road movies in the US Far West, who would believe similar shots may be made in the French "corn deserts" north of Paris? (Just get off, anywhere, from the A-1 auto route, between Paris and Lille, and see what I mean). Once again good use is made of the French richness in "patrimoine', meaning old village locations, and, as a peak, the old country farm house, the main character grew up in. What a great ruin, an ideal Parisians holiday home!! The weak points, I think at least, are mainly in the script, and casting. Sylvia's daughter, is partly miscasted, as she is the opposite to Sylvia, in looks and character. The storyline resembles a cheap love-novel sometimes, in its sentimentality. Nevertheless, a fine example of French "authors'" film making, in a natural style only the French can make.

Isabelle Huppert's character is neither brain-damaged nor schizophrenic. She suffers from what the DSM IV terms "dissociative amnesia". Some people just call it dissociation. The popular term for this phenomenon is repressed memories; however, professionals no longer use that term because it is inaccurate and fraught with misperceptions.

My interpretation of this character's history is this: At some point in her past, before she married her husband and had children, she experienced something which was so traumatic, terrifying, and threatening to her sense of safety and existence,that she had to lose awareness of it in order to not lose her mind. She had a breakdown later on and entered the psychiatric hospital. She got married and things were going okay for awhile but then something triggered the old trauma and she became dissociative again. She left her husband, started a new life and "forgot" all about her old life. She became emotionally shut down and empty because at this point she only functioned with a small amount of her emotional make-up. She had to shut the rest of it down because it contained knowledge that was too threatening for her to know about.

Then she has to run away because of the murder and she re-reads the letters from her ex-husband and slowly starts regaining awareness of that part of her life. However, she still can't remember the original trauma that caused all her problems. When she arrives back at the old house, images and impressions of her life there flood through her mind as if from a dream. This is what memories lost through dissociation are like when they come back. The director evoked this experience pretty accurately. I wanted to tell friends that if they want to see what it's like to remember things that one has lost through dissociation, to see this movie.

She lost the memory of her husband and her life with him because in some way that experience connected to the earlier, unbearable trauma.

She goes back to the psychiatric hospital because she wants to know about her past. She wants to know what happened during her marriage and also what the original trauma was.

I am not pulling this out of the air. For someone knowledgeable about dissociative amnesia, the clues in the movie are obvious.

For one thing, the husband refers in his letter to "that old trouble", or something like that. He says something like, "I know how fragile you are, but I thought that old trouble was behind you..." I can't remember exactly what he says. As I understood it, he was referring to trouble caused by traumatic experiences early in her life. Others may believe he's talking about mental illness such as schizophrenia, but they are incorrect. I'd have to see the film again to argue this point more effectively. However, there's too much else in this movie that makes it clear her problem is dissociation, not schizophrenia.

I can make this case with confidence because this character's story mirrors my own in many ways. The idea that a person can forget events central to her life because they call up old emotions and traumas, which she needed to block out, is not far-fetched. It happened to me. I did forget a significant person, as well as the events and emotions connected with him. I did read his letters years later, and when I did, I started to remember our relationship of 27 years previously. I did find him and after I did, I gradually remembered most of what our relationship had been and who he was. When I called him out of the blue, he told me he had been in love with me all his life. He had never married. Now, he has moved on, after we talked at length about what had happened and I explained to him why I had broken up with him in the terrible way that I did.

When I remembered the relationship I'd had with him, all the emotions connected with it felt as if they'd happened last week, not 27 years ago.

I too have been wanting to remember the details of the original trauma. I had started remembering it before I remembered the old boyfriend. A lot of it has come back, but not all. I think that Isabelle's character probably did get at least some of the answers she was looking for. The fact that the audience didn't get these answers only means that the specific reason she dissociated in the first place is not the most important part of the story.

What's important is the story that came after -- how it affected her and her family, what they all lost, and how she recovered her full self.

It's also about how people need love to heal and how love enables us to heal each other.

`La Vie promise' is the sad, meandering and stillborn tale of a streetwalker with a shattered brain who, in a moment of danger, flees from Nice into the country and tries in vain to return to an old lover and child and time when the life`promised' her had been much rosier. This is very far from being Isabelle Huppert's best work, simply because the journey chronicled in `La Vie Promise' is lacking in coherence and momentum. Huppert is always impressive, but the movie just isn't up to her remarkable talents and can't adequately display them. One can only assume she took on the role of Sylvia because it seemed a challenge to become a rough whore with bad hair. Her presence never ceases to be arresting, her face a glorious tacky ruin framed by bleach blond strands, white lipstick, and desperate blank stare. There are moments when one can enjoy just looking into those cold, beautiful eyes. But time passes slowly.

It's not that the other principals aren't both good. They're Maud Forget as Laurence, Sylvia's older daughter, who accompanies her – sporadically: they keep abandoning each other and then in far fetched coincidences re-connecting -- on the voyage back in search of the lost life, and Pascal Greggory as Joshua, a mysterious man with a prison past and a car theft present (why does he seem so sensitive and nice?) who chooses to accompany the two women and be their driver. Joshua too goes off, but then comes back to drive them again at the end. This is the movie's signature move: dump people, then pick them up again – if you can. There's not much hope and ultimately not much point to these people's desperate lives. The patchy, disorganized plot repeatedly destroys the energy and emotion the scenes between Sylvia, Laurence, Joshua, et al. have built up. This is a clumsily assembled story that no amount of emoting can save.

Surely the challenge for Huppert was to enter a rougher world than usual and cast off her usual hauteur and elegance, and in the early scenes indeed she's barely recognizable. But as time wears on the imperious gestures return and Huppert is Huppert again; the smallest details like the way she holds a cigarette become glamorous and confident, as in other roles – even as her character loses energy and hope and the `promise' of arriving at some kind of powerful finale gradually fades. The movie, like Huppert's mask as the damaged, desperate Sylvia, also deconstructs, because its emotional climax – the scene when Sylvia at last finds Piotr (André Marcon), the man who once loved her but now is raising their eight-year-old son with a new wife, is just a sad little moment that sits ill with the Hallmark card, David Hamilton soft focus and flower images that have characterized most of the outdoor scenery.

The irrelevant prettiness of these flower moments is as grating as the corny American songs that are periodically interjected to crudely underline some plot point. But what point? We get that Laurence has some kind of illness, but is it chronic indigestion or epilepsy? Sylvia turns out to have spent time in a sanitorium, and so we gather that she's brain damaged, which makes recognition scenes pretty much non-starters. What's wrong with her, and why she can't remember former neighbors and other people in her old life but knows Piotr and instantly bonds with the son she hasn't seen since he was two, are not questions M. Dahan is able to answer for us. Somehow the lack of a back-story doesn't make a story.