L’ombre des femmes
Welcome to the new year! In my attempt to revive my movie-watching, I realized that there is one single very effective strategy, even more effective than making a list according to some theme (like Inarritu’s latest movies) and trying to check off that list: discover a film I have never heard about before and watch it immediately. I read about “L’ombre des femmes” in a Spiegel review, and it caught my attention instantly because of Philippe Garrel (whose “Amants Réguliers” I started but never continued), its classic storyline, wonderful visuals (b/w 35mm cinemascope is absolutely amazing) and, most of all, Stanislas Merhar. When I was a young girl, I was really into that 4 episode Monte Cristo miniseries where Merhar played Mercédès’s kinda effeminate son.
I watched my only Chantal Akerman film “La Captive” because of Merhar too. There is just something curiously odd about him that draws me into him; I don’t even think he is good-looking even though he has a near perfect body at age 45 which Garrel is totally showing off in this film. Back in the day, my father hated the way Merhar walked, but while he shed his milky face with progressing age, he still has that weird shoulder-shaking walk – hahaha! Both in “La Captive” and in this film, he plays a douche terrorizing the woman he loves, and somehow he manages to remain relatable at the same time. I don’t know if he has been in more mainstream films, but the intellectual French hypocrite lover roles à la Jean-Pierre Léaud suit him. For me, it’s a joy to watch him navigate the feelings he has towards the women in his life.
Another surprise for me was Clotilde Courau whom I find quite amazing. I think she does a great job at showing all the pain her husband makes her go through, and I am absolutely enamored with her Julie-Delpy-like face. In fact, I am impressed by how good both of them look with all their wrinkles and frowns. I don’t think either of them could have done this at age 20 when they couldn’t convincibly show these kinds of marks of life. I find their chemistry just perfect, making them something like my new favorite French couple now.
Sadly I don’t watch all that many French movies anymore, even though I love the French flavor of love stories. There are so many convincing affairs in them, and not in the Woody Allen kind of way. Sometimes I find them too paternalistic, but “L’ombre des femmes” is paternalistic enough to feel realistic and not too much to annoy me. I think the last French love story I saw was “Arrete ou je continue”, and I find it interesting to compare these two films. Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos are just a little bit older (they were basically the same age in the film because “Arrete ou je continue” is 2 years older than “L’ombre des femmes”), but they are much bigger stars despite being less attractive in classical way. They, too, work as a couple, especially as one that is getting into a sort of mid-life-crisis doubting their relationship as a whole. As a relationship story, I thought that “Arrete ou je continue” wins hands down. Its characters are more interesting, the premise is less typical, the execution is funny in a great way and their relationship lives on even shakier grounds, but it’s the subtlety of what is going wrong that makes the film interesting. They also lead a much more modern relationship.
Even though “L’ombre des femmes” did not generate all that many emotions in me, I thought about the film a lot, especially its lovely ending in which we see the characters with the kind of happiness that you didn’t think the film (or the actors!) had in them. In fact, I thought the ending twists (both of them) were rather clever considering that I found the rest of the film pretty standard in terms of storytelling. Just like how something draws me to Stanislas Merhar, I am similarly drawn to “L’ombre des femmes” itself, maybe because it looks so pretty, maybe because I like its protagonists, maybe because I have been craving a movie just like that.