Death hovers over director Emily Atef’s fifth feature, More Than Ever (Plus Que Jamais), in unsettling ways. First, it fuels this solemn and emotionally gripping story about a woman in a relationship who’s diagnosed with a rare lung disease and faced with her imminent demise. Second, and even more upsettingly, the woman’s partner in the film was portrayed by Gaspard Ulliel, who was freakishly killed in a ski accident earlier this year at the ripe age of 37, marking a significant loss for French cinema.
More Than Ever features one of Ulliel’s most tender performances — an anomaly in the career of a beautiful and gifted actor, who, with his Alain Delon-esque features, grave voice and searing presence that would make you do a double-take as soon as he walked on screen, was known more for playing sinister villains like Hannibal Lecter or tortured creators like Yves Saint-Laurent.
Here he co-stars as Mathieu, the attentive long-time boyfriend of Hélène (Vicky Krieps), a woman already in the last stages of a fatal illness known as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. Most people come down with IPF when they’ve reached their 70s, which makes Hélène, who’s still in her 30s, extremely unlucky. As the only known cure for her malady is a lung transplant with rather dubious odds at succeeding, Hélène has been more or less handed a death sentence, and Mathieu can only look on in disbelief.
The sheer frustration and despair of their predicament is at the heart of More Than Ever, and yet the film is not really a downer, revealing instead how it’s possible to find shreds of hope in a hopeless situation. Atef, whose previous work includes the baby blues drama The Stranger and the Romy Schneider portrait 3 Days in Quiberon, is something of a specialist at depicting women in the midst of major depressions, and when her new movie begins that seems to be the case with Hélène. But the script, which the director wrote with Lars Hubrich, takes some intriguing turns, and what started out as a tale of death foretold becomes something closer to a realistic story of life affirmed — however short and even sorrowful that life may be.
Ulliel is touching and memorable as a man who, despite trying however hard he can, is unable to enter his girlfriend’s headspace, to feel what she feels. “The living cannot understand the dying,” someone proclaims later on, and that’s what drives Hélène to leave the couple’s stifling (for her) Bordeaux apartment for the wide-open spaces of Norway, where she tracks down an older man, Bent (Bjørn Floberg), who runs a blog about his experiences with colon cancer and takes Hélène into his home as a fellow sufferer.
Hélène’s departure marks a shift in the couple’s doomed relationship with Mathieu, isolating her so she can better find herself, with Bent’s occasional pep talks and the breathtaking Norwegian vistas helping her see death from a new perspective. At that point, Mathieu, whom she leaves back in France despite his protestations, exits the drama, only resurfacing on a few FaceTime calls before making a moving return during the finale.
More Than Ever is really Hélène’s story, and it’s also, ultimately, Krieps’ movie. Alongside her turn in the well-received Austrian film Corsage, also playing in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, she gives a quiet knockout of a performance as a woman constantly searching for a way to reconcile with her fate — to experience it on her terms. Sometimes it’s about the little things, like searching for help online or dictating a text message to Mathieu, and Krieps infuses even those moments with a rare mix of sadness and spontaneity, as if they were happening to her for the first time.
There are more dire events as well, such as when Hélène falls short of breath, gasping for air that cannot pass through her lungs, but the film is mostly focuses on the everyday stuff — a train ride alone at night, a conversation over pizza, a dip into an icy fjord — that occurs while major events loom over us. Some of the movie’s best scenes are ones where nothing much seems to happen at all, and yet Krieps still makes us register Hélène’s pain and disquiet, her endless reckoning with the inevitable.
At two hours, More Than Ever can feel stretched out, with a third act that could have used some trimming. Just like Hélène, we pretty much know where things are headed, and the film might have taken a little less time to get there. But for the most part we’re engrossed as we watch Hélène and Mathieu wrestle with their destinies, which DP Yves Cape (Holy Motors, Zombi Child) frames against the peaks of Norway, as if to better emphasize how this tiny story can also feel monumental. By restraining her film to two great actors and one great backdrop, Atef has landed on the right formula for a cinema that’s always been obsessed with suffering, especially of the female kind, giving it a scope here that’s both bigger and more intimate than ever before.
Director: Emily Atef
Screenplay: Emily Atef, Lars Hubrich
Cast: Vicky Krieps, Gaspard Ulliel, Bjørn Floberg
Producer: Xénia Mangot
Cinematography: Yves Cape
Production design: Silke Fisher
Editing: Sandie Bompar, Hansjörg Weisbrich
Music: Jon Balke
Production compaies: Eaux Vives Productions SARL (France), NiKo Film (Germany), Samsa Film (Luxembourg), Mer Film (Norway)
World sales: The Match Factory
In French, English, Norwegian
122 minutes
