The unhappily married woman struggles to break free from social pressures and her boring suburban setting.
Notable as veteran auteur Claude Miller’s last film, it falls short of being a fitting send-off.
Stifling like an airless house, Miller's adaptation of the period novel is a beautiful, measured epitaph.
The subtleties and ambiguities Mauriac entertained in the novel find no equivalent on screen, and the heroic independence of Thérèse often looks like mere self-indulgence, or self-pity.
Ultimately though, it feels too reined-in for its own good. While Tautou’s delicate restraint as Thérèse is admirable, the vagueness of her character’s disquiet becomes an irritation.
It's an opaque performance from Tautou in many ways, understandably so, and perhaps the film does not fully get inside her mind and heart; a confident, robust work nevertheless.
Takes a long time to get to the meat of the story and, as a result, Tautou’s performance ends up being too aloof when it should be enigmatic.
It has an autumnal, elegiac feeling as if Miller knew this would be his swansong.
A handsome, solidly acted period movie about deliberately dislikable people, it's the swansong of a director who was a longtime assistant to François Truffaut.
The never-ending running time places the final nail in the coffin. Despite the picture’s alluring visuals, this satisfaction is outweighed by it’s lack of substance.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
RSS feed of Cinema reviews