Gabrielle - love of my life

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Movie
German title Gabrielle - love of my life
Original title Gabrielle
Country of production Germany , France , Italy
original language French
Publishing year 2005
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Patrice Chereau
script Patrice Chéreau
Anne-Louise Trividic
production Serge Catoire
music Fabio Vacchi
camera Eric Gautier
cut François Gédigier
occupation

Gabrielle - The Love of My Life is a 2005 film by French director Patrice Chéreau .

The drama is based on the story The Return by Joseph Conrad and was produced by the film studio Azor Films in collaboration with Canal Plus , ARTE and ZDF . The end of a marriage is shown from the point of view of the husband Jean Hervey . His wife leaves him, completely surprising for Jean, for another man, but returns after a few hours. The marriage that Jean believed to be intact is destroyed and a journey into the emotional depths of a relationship begins.

The film stands on the threshold of modernity and reflects the self-destruction of a decadent society after the turn of the century .

action

In Marcel Proust's tone , Jean tells of lost time: how he met Gabrielle , fell in love, married shortly after the first meeting, what he thought and felt. Gabrielle fit his ordered world in every way. The couple has been married for ten years and has no children. You sleep in one room, but stay cool at a distance, and both supposedly don't miss anything. Jean is very rich as a newspaper publisher, he describes the routine of their social life, the evenings together with the same people. On Thursdays a crowd of artists, musicians, journalists and business people meet in his luxurious city palace for jour fixe with a sumptuous meal, they play for money, are entertained by music, chat superficially with each other and are popular in this society frozen in conventions.

When Jean comes home one day, he finds a letter in which his wife writes that she has left him. A world collapses in Jean. Gabrielle nevertheless returns that evening. For Jean, the relationship is over. He doesn't want anyone to find out, not the staff standing at the door listening to the couple's arguments, not the friends. The facade of a happy, civil marriage should definitely be preserved.

Gabrielle now describes marriage from her point of view, an alliance of convenience between two people for mutual benefit, not the worst, but devoid of any feeling. Physically, Jean disgusts her. She explains to him that she left him when she had the opportunity to experience what love is once in a lifetime. Jean loses composure. She now realizes that Jean's feelings for her were real: "If I had suspected, only suspected for a second that you love me, I would never have returned."

Jean searches for the other man. For him it is incomprehensible, his editor-in-chief, a plump, boorish and pushy person who is heartily disliked to him. At his insistence, Gabrielle, who has long denied herself to Jean, finally tells him in detail how she enjoyed sex with this man. But once was enough for her.

Despair triumphs over the calm displayed by Jean. In front of the assembled Thursday company he loses his composure, and you leave the house embarrassed. In superimposed sentences, like in a silent film, Jean calls Gabrielle and begs her: “Stay!”, “Help me!” Lying apathetically and provocatively on the bed at the same time, Gabrielle offers herself to her husband. He explores her body by feeling. When he tries to love her, she is completely devoid of emotion. When she answered yes to his question as to whether she could live like this, he rushed out of the house and a silent film overlay told the viewer: "He never returned."

Stylistic devices

Chéreau divides the film into the two phases of past and destruction . While the past remains in black and white, the destruction alternates between color and the contrasting image as a symbol for the tornness of jeans, which vacillates between reality and wishful thinking. The narrative, almost chatty tone of the beginning gives way to a chamber play that reflects aspects of the silent film. The word, spoken aloud and inaudible to the stage people in the theater, becomes a stylistic device: Jean bares his soul in front of staff and guests because he can no longer really grasp the pain of the bystanders. The camera shudders from point to point.

The stage is a huge house, which with countless busts, stucco and columns is more of a museum than a home and in which everything breathes cold. As Gabrielle, Isabelle Huppert looks like one of those statues, of which there are so many in this house, in her immobility and her otherworldly emotional world.

Fabio Vacchi composes a late romantic caricature in which he takes polyphony ad absurdum . Disharmonious chords ghost through the sounds of a large orchestra in shock and chamber cast. In doing so, Vacchi uses harmonies that were about to break into the modern age. It is music that seems to originate from the time in which this film is set and which exudes Gustav Mahler's morbid.

Reviews

The critics unanimously praised the performance of the two main actors.

  • "A superbly played, artificial marriage drama in an idiosyncratic, emphatically theatrical staging that exposes the self-deception of a social class and shows the masochism of a society that does not admit its own feelings." Film-dienst .
  • In the “cinema, some great things have come about from duels: duels between producer and director, director and actor. Hitchcock wrestled with Kim Novak when he was shooting 'Vertigo', Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman, Billy Wilder with Marilyn Monroe, Godard with Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang. But seldom have a film director and an actress met as equals as Isabelle Huppert and Patrice Chéreau. ” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
  • “Patrice Chéreau stages the story, which is based on a story by Joseph Conrad, as an oppressive chamber play. He transports the inner coldness of the protagonists onto the canvas in dark, cool images. (...) Isabelle Huppert shines in the role of the wife who still has wishes and dreams, but ultimately does not have the strength to implement them. "

Awards

In 2005, Patrice Chereau's film was in competition at the Venice Film Festival , but was defeated by Ang Lee's drama Brokeback Mountain . A year later, at the award ceremony of the most important French film prize, César , the film was nominated in six categories, including Patrice Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic for the best adapted screenplay and leading actress Isabelle Huppert, who received her thirteenth actor nomination . While Huppert lost to her colleague Nathalie Baye ( A Fatal Decision ), the costume designer Caroline de Vivaise and the production design by Olivier Radot won awards.

César
  • Best costumes
  • Best production design
  • nominated in the categories of best leading actress (Isabelle Huppert), best adapted screenplay, best camera, best sound.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gabrielle - Love of my Life. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  2. ↑ Carsten Heidböhmer: It's ice cold in the Ehehölle Der Stern, January 15, 2006, accessed on September 2, 2019