There is fairly common advice given to people considering wading into matters involving two lovers: don’t do it. That advice gets a literal enactment in writer-director Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s A Woman. It’s a serviceable drama-thriller once you get past that awfully bland international title. (Its original French is Une femme de notre temps).
The scene demonstrating that advice ends violently but that is hardly the only consequence of an action taken by the central character, a French police chief named Julie played by Sophie Marceau. Way before the scene, she appears pretty much in control of her life and in love with her husband, the tall, rather good-looking Hugo (Johan Heldenbergh). But anyone who has seen even a half-dozen thrillers knows that when a character pledges love, unprovoked, at the start of a picture, there is a good chance that that love will be tested over the course of the film. As a corollary to that idea, there is also a good chance that if a character is seen at a shooting range in an early scene, his or her skill with weaponry will be brought to use at some point. For those who have seen the poster of this film, it’s not quite Chekhov’s Gun. Let’s call it Chekhov’s Arrow.
Away from these easily identifiable patterns in modern cinema, the story told in A Woman is concerned with Julie, who is grieving for her sister Lydia, who died under circumstances that appear mysterious at first. For some reason, Julie blames herself for her sister’s death; later at work, she is brusque when speaking about the death of Marceau, a police officer who was less than a saint. The too-obvious concept here is contrast: the viewer is supposed to take her brashness in talking about this officer as a symptom of Julie’s personal code of ethical infallibility. A close colleague doesn’t quite understand why she’s so cold about the man’s death and the law’s attempt at bringing the responsible party to book. To be honest, parts of the audience will feel the same way. It’s unclear if Julie’s strenuous indifference is Marceau’s fault or the script’s flaw.
Nevertheless, that moral uprightness (or highhandedness) will be put to the test when Julie discovers her husband is sleeping with another woman. The discovery is a brutal one as A Woman isn’t one of those films where, through some extraordinary use of Google and/or a careless lipstick stain and/or the appearance of underwear in a pocket, a wife discovers the existence of another woman receiving the fervent ministrations of her husband.
Those are too remote. Instead, the scene that changes everything is written so that Julie is on the other side of the wall as carnal things unfold. Her rival’s moans of pleasure are close enough that she could whisper and still be audible, and her shoulder-length hair is within grasp. But rather than grab a handful of that hair and pull with all of her policewoman might, Julie crumbles. She is a respectful woman, you see. And she is the mother to a daughter who some might say shows up too conveniently at home later. At the dinner table, she praises her parent’s union while she tells them about a breakup so bad that, in a hallucinatory daze, she envisions her former boyfriend on the street happily navigating the tongue of another girl. Julie takes the opportunity to ask her cheating husband what he would do if he found out that she’s cheating on him. He says he’d have to kill her. Maybe it’s a joke; maybe it isn’t. But it has been said. Julie absorbs the answer coolly. But her unravelling will come.
The film’s sound design ramps up the suspense in the film’s second half and the dramatic stakes are raised a notch by the introduction of an important subplot. You get the sense that Civeyrac wants to get to the philosophical truth that lies in the heart of his protagonist. He wants his audience to understand how a single event might transform an otherwise good person. But by choosing to go this route via genre stylings, his film needs its dramatic elements to be just as potent as its philosophical underpinnings. He succeeds to some extent, but the central relationship between Julie and Hugo is too cold to really power the film’s thriller aspects. Maybe it needs more passion than is available between the leads. Or maybe the story just needs to be moved out of Europe to, say, a place where, in the popular imagination, the concept of a mistress is a lot more likely to send a rush of blood to the head.
Director, Screenplay: Jean-Paul Civeyrac
Cast: Sophie Marceau, Johan Heldenbergh, Cristina Flutur, Héloïse Bousquet, Michaël Erpelding
Producers: Frédéric Niedermayer, Oury Milshtein
Cinematography: Pierre-Hubert Martin
Editor: Louise Narboni
Sound: Dana Farzanehpour, Émeline Aldeguer, Stéphane Thiébaut
Music: Valentin Silvestrov
Production companies: Moby Dick Films, Iliade et Films
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
In French
96 minutes
