User Reviews

Benoit Jacquot's _Suzanna Andler_ is a minor key masterclass in filmmaking. Although the cast is spare -- each scene has two characters, unless it has one -- the camera is a constant dynamic companion, closing in, pulling out, observing, judging. On the minimalist set the glitter in Andler's embroidered shirt, the blue twirl of cigeratte smoke become startling special effects. The main setting is dominated by the wide balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, the sea separating two strips of land at the edges of Jacquot's widescreen composition, as if to emphasize that, even when actors share the frame, they are oceans apart. Except for a few chords of medieval music, ambient noise and the sound of the sea punctuate the characters' dialogues. Towards dusk, the quasi-natural lighting is reminiscent of that of high-contrast black-and-white films, with the camera swirling around the characters, the lens's shallow focus now favoring the person in the house, now illuminating the one outside. Decorating the dining hall of the voluminous villa are modernist landscape paintings, child-like and jarring in a film where innocence goes to die.

Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the despondent Suzanna. Her boyish haircut and miniskirt channel Delphine Seyrig, even if Seyrig plays the "unknown woman" instead of the lead in _Baxter, Vera Baxter_, Marguerite Duras' own adaptation of the same play. You can feel the winter chill in the fur Gainsbourg wears. Her Suzanna is the wife of rich financier Jean, and she is ostensibly sent to finalize the rental of the villa as summer vacation home. In reality it seems a ploy to push her into the arms of her lover Michel (Niels Schneider), a small-time writer. The husband, who only materializes as a disembodied voice, has been having affairs and neglecting her since her 9-year old was born. His minions are everywhere though, including the real-estate agent and Suzanna's "friend" Monique, one of Jean's numerous former mistresses. She is played by Jacquot's frequent muse Julia Roy, as if to multiply the sense of complicity.

Downhill from the balcony is a stone-rimmed seashore, where Suzanna spies on two unknown women's conversation. Or so she tells Michel. Perhaps she is lying -- she herself and Monique are those conversationalists, shown sharing intimate, possibly false, details of their respective affairs in one of the film's earlier long acts. Suzanna lies a great deal, to herself and others, even as everyone hides things from her. She is incredibly passive, seemingly watching her life unfold from the outside, yet for all that, unable to see very much.

The entire film takes place in these two locations, and unfold chronologically in four acts from hung-over mid morning to elegiac sundown. I haven't read the play (I doubt it is available in translation, even though it was once staged in New York) but the writing seems pure Duras. Both husband and lover whisper her name like an incantation; the ghostly litany of exotic places she has visited (Paris, Cannes, Bordeaux) becomes a substitute for having lived a real life. In the last act she reunites with her inconstant lover, and Gainsbourg finally lets down her guard and her mask. Suzanna loves Michel's cruelty, his bad-boy vibe, obsession with fast car and drinking. If the relationship seems a car-wreck waiting to happen, their embrace at the film's end at last, for an instance, obliterates the gulf between human beings Jacquot's precise camera work has insinuated since the beginning of the film. _Suzanne Andler_ is a portrait of an tawdry affair from an era as bygone and quaint as the corded telephones in the film, but its emotions and personal demons are universal. To paraphrase Alice Diop pontificating on another Duras screenplay, Jacquot's formalist craft and Gainsbourg's nuanced acting translate Suzanna's shame into a state of grace.