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Gabrielle

2005, Movie, NR, 90 mins

Gabrielle: Review

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 popular salon that, while not yet host to the cream of high society, has attracted members of the artistic set, thanks in large part to Jean's philanthropic sponsorship of a cultural newspaper. But the ground beneath Jean's painstakingly maintained world suddenly undergoes a seismic shift when he returns home one evening to find a letter from Gabrielle on his dressing table. In it, she coolly announces that after 10 years of marriage she's leaving him for her unnamed lover, someone capable of expressing the kind of passion she craves and Jean abhors. Jean is devastated by her betrayal and the thought of the public scandal that will undoubtedly ensue, but his misery is interrupted by Gabrielle's unexpected return. She doesn't say whether she's had a change of mind or heart, but it's clear she's prepared to carry on with what's now undeniably a sham marriage. Jean, however, isn't so sure. Best known for his jungle nightmares and tales of South Sea adventure, Conrad was also an acute observer of the social scene and, like fellow outsider Henry James, under whose strong influence The Return was written, the Polish-born, French-educated Conrad was deeply interested in the subtleties of English society. While Chereau has transplanted the action from London to what we may presume is Paris, Conrad's original observations about high society as a cage filled with human suffering remain valid. Originally staged in three rooms over the course of just a few hours, the action is here spread across several days and, as the title suggests, Chereau shifts the focus from Jean to Gabrielle, who suffers mostly in silence throughout Conrad's story. Interestingly, Chereau offers a third perspective on the meaning of happiness among the emotionally masked rich by giving voice to Gabrielle's maid (Claudia Coli), that rarely acknowledged character in fin-de-siecle novels, who here assumes the spectator's privileged point of view. leave a comment --Ken Fox