SAN FRANCISCO -- La Petite Chartreuse, a slim, bleak film directed by Jean-Pierre Denis, is a story of the walking wounded. Each character suffers from crippling loneliness. Emotionally damaged or nearly dead, they claw their way toward human connection. Denis strives to dramatize the redemptive power of love but fails to achieve a transcendent payoff.
Despite fine acting and able cinematography from Dardennes brothers alumnus, Benoit Dervaux, this promising film comes perilously close to an exercise in existential angst. It could find a limited art house audience with special handling.
Denis, who collaborated on adapting Pierre Peju's novel with Yvon Rouve, tries to lighten the book's relentless misery; nonetheless, the film is as sharp-edged and impenetrable as the snowy alpine peaks of Grenoble where the main character finds refuge.
The exceptional Oliver Gourmet (La Promesse) plays Etienne, a book dealer and barely recovered alcoholic who has given up the juice but not the rage that drove him to it. While driving his car, he runs over young Eva. Her feckless single mother, Pascale (Marie-Josee Croze), unable to cope with a healthy child, runs away from caring for a severely injured one. Croze, in an unsympathetic part, shows us a fragile, diffuse personality, a woman, who, with a shrug, turns her daughter over to the stranger who nearly killed her.
The accident puts Eva in a coma and sends Etienne reeling. He makes guilt-ridden attempts to reach the inert girl -- somehow he knows that she is his last chance -- and, later, he has an impulsive encounter with her mother. Their voracious coupling in a ditch alongside a highway comes out of animal hunger rather than desire.
Gourmet rises to the tough assignment of portraying a man who exists in a state of eternal winter. A blustering bear of a man with a bespectacled, slightly cross-eyed gaze, the actor brings to his role the befuddlement of Bert Lahr's cowardly lion, laced with seething hostility. When, after the accident, he pulls off the road and howls in the wilderness, Gourmet conveys the despair of a man who has been abandoned by all that is kind and fair.
Despite fine acting and able cinematography from Dardennes brothers alumnus, Benoit Dervaux, this promising film comes perilously close to an exercise in existential angst. It could find a limited art house audience with special handling.
Denis, who collaborated on adapting Pierre Peju's novel with Yvon Rouve, tries to lighten the book's relentless misery; nonetheless, the film is as sharp-edged and impenetrable as the snowy alpine peaks of Grenoble where the main character finds refuge.
The exceptional Oliver Gourmet (La Promesse) plays Etienne, a book dealer and barely recovered alcoholic who has given up the juice but not the rage that drove him to it. While driving his car, he runs over young Eva. Her feckless single mother, Pascale (Marie-Josee Croze), unable to cope with a healthy child, runs away from caring for a severely injured one. Croze, in an unsympathetic part, shows us a fragile, diffuse personality, a woman, who, with a shrug, turns her daughter over to the stranger who nearly killed her.
The accident puts Eva in a coma and sends Etienne reeling. He makes guilt-ridden attempts to reach the inert girl -- somehow he knows that she is his last chance -- and, later, he has an impulsive encounter with her mother. Their voracious coupling in a ditch alongside a highway comes out of animal hunger rather than desire.
Gourmet rises to the tough assignment of portraying a man who exists in a state of eternal winter. A blustering bear of a man with a bespectacled, slightly cross-eyed gaze, the actor brings to his role the befuddlement of Bert Lahr's cowardly lion, laced with seething hostility. When, after the accident, he pulls off the road and howls in the wilderness, Gourmet conveys the despair of a man who has been abandoned by all that is kind and fair.
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