(WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM.)
Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche turn in fine performances in this killer-with-a-heart-of-gold melodrama. But the plot is unrealistic.
Auguste Neel was in fact guillotined in Saint-Pierre in the nineteenth century after waiting months for the means of execution to arrive from Martinique. You can see the guillotine in Saint-Pierre's modern and beautifully designed museum. (Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, a French territory hard by the coast of southern Newfoundland, is an absorbing place to visit; I was there in 1999.)
In the movie, Neel wanders around the island after receiving his death sentence for murder, performing one good deed after another -- some heroic, others mundane, but all saintly. Was the French penal system really so inflexible that no one would commute his sentence despite all his good works, including saving another's life? That's the way it's portrayed.
Neel would have been even more saintly to take the islanders up on one of the many chances they gave him to escape to "les Anglais" (i.e., Newfoundland, 10 miles away across a channel). In the end, his self-imposed martyrdom proves foolish, for it leads not only to his own execution, but to that of Daniel Auteuil's character as well.
Nevertheless, the film is beautifully photographed and the acting is fine. I give it 7 out of 10.
Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche turn in fine performances in this killer-with-a-heart-of-gold melodrama. But the plot is unrealistic.
Auguste Neel was in fact guillotined in Saint-Pierre in the nineteenth century after waiting months for the means of execution to arrive from Martinique. You can see the guillotine in Saint-Pierre's modern and beautifully designed museum. (Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, a French territory hard by the coast of southern Newfoundland, is an absorbing place to visit; I was there in 1999.)
In the movie, Neel wanders around the island after receiving his death sentence for murder, performing one good deed after another -- some heroic, others mundane, but all saintly. Was the French penal system really so inflexible that no one would commute his sentence despite all his good works, including saving another's life? That's the way it's portrayed.
Neel would have been even more saintly to take the islanders up on one of the many chances they gave him to escape to "les Anglais" (i.e., Newfoundland, 10 miles away across a channel). In the end, his self-imposed martyrdom proves foolish, for it leads not only to his own execution, but to that of Daniel Auteuil's character as well.
Nevertheless, the film is beautifully photographed and the acting is fine. I give it 7 out of 10.