Gabrielle

Based on Joseph Conrad's early novella "The Return," Patrice Chereau's portrait of a marriage en crise is an excoriating look at the deep unhappiness that can fester within the most respectable-seeming of households. Socially prominent, smugly content in his material wealth and revolted by anything so common as an outward show of emotion, Jean Hervey (Pascal Greggory) is the very picture of fin-de-siecle complacency and success. In the beautiful Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert), Jean has found the right kind of wife — intelligent, witty and from an even better-connected family than his own — and their stately, sepulchral townhouse is the center of an increasingly ...