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 Comedy of Innocence More at IMDbPro »Comédie de l'innocence (original title)

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Mysterious gem from Ruiz, 17 September 2005
9/10
Author: dyew2 from United States

... who establishes himself yet again as one of world cinema's most intriguing contemporary directors. The cast is excellent and the story unfolds with an eerie, graceful and inexorable pull. Particularly fascinating is the innate childishness of brother and sister characters played by Charles Berling and Isabelle Huppert - and to some extent by Jeanne Balibar and Denis Polydades. A creepy meta-thriller that also manages to make interesting comments on parenting and responsibility. On the Wellspring DVD there's also an insightful interview with director Raoul Ruiz, a bit opaque but not surprising given his filmography.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Understated performances making for an original thriller, 4 May 2002
Author: Kyf Symsn from coventry, uk

Story about two women both trying to persuade a confused young boy that she is his real ‘mommy'. The viewer is only shown as much as the boy's actual mother throughout the film, leaving us as confused to the reality of the situation as she.

Huppert gives a great understated performance as the real mother, desperately trying to hold on to her son, who's slipping out of her grasp, and the two child performances are fantastic.

The underlying anxieties of the characters boil over every now and then into some slightly chilling scenes, with the complex storyline making even the minor characters interesting to watch (in an almost ‘film noir' style).

The score seems slightly ‘over the top' at times but this just adds to the films strange sinister feel.

7.5 out of 10

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Probabilities of fiction, as the chasms of the mind, 24 July 2011
8/10
Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

With this one Ruiz redeems himself well for some of the more hollow stuff he produced in the 90's. It is, as so many times before, a fiction about possible fictions as assembled in the imaginative mind. About various figments of the one mind enacting their roles in a fantasy unfolding as the unfathomable echoes bubbling in some far surface of reality.

At first, it seems to be about a child intuitively guided to look for his true face, the true motherly source from which we are all outsourced at birth and to which the biological mother is only the affectionate mask. The kid is miraculously drawn to another mother, tied to the first by the strange coincidence so favored by surrealists.

But it soon turns out that we are not with the child in this, rather with the discarded face of the mother. The woman drawn to her reflected image in the eyes of the kid and made whole in it. Two women as one, each the other's surrogate mother, each the surrogate daughter in turn.

And then it moves again, starting with a dinner scene that reverses the one that begins the film. Now the characters have switched places, the room is dark. A film-within guides us further, footage captured by the kid in his strolls around the park. There is an imaginary friend who turns out to be real, and a madhouse in the countryhouse where only those admitted can leave at will.

Then the mysterious ending suddenly seems to pull everything back into the surface of reality (we can never be sure though). Was after all the kid only the mother's helpful aid (like her brother, Serge, inside the fantasy) in recovering the husband who is away on business (imagined as an inner child, susceptible to allure of the female figure) from the imaginary hands of a deceitfull mistress?

It's a fascinating ploy and the overall construct, though occasionally thin, resonates with the illusionary reality of the mind. How we weave portentous narrative around us with us center stage in the myth, what masks we choose to hide behind or let fall. Lots of Oedipus, transported to suburban France as surreal essay into the conundrums of fiction.

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2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
The Ghost of Reality in an Uncanny Comedy by Raoul Ruiz, 1 September 2011
Author: Adam Gai from Jerusalem, Israel

The late director Raul Ruiz has declared that what interested him when making films was the middle ground between traditional narrative and experimentalism. His movie The Comedy of Innocence (2000) is based in a novel by futurist writer Massimo Bontempelli, The Boy with Two Mothers, and recreates as in an unstoppable nightmare the archetypal fantasy of the child that imagines that his parents are not the real ones. The family lives in a strange Parisian house besieged by the remembrance of a dead incestuous eternal grandfather. The father is frequently absent, and the mother- theater designer- is suddenly refused as such by his nine years old unique son. Another mother, the ideal one that in fantasy every child wants to possess, will appear "really" in the world of the movie and in the video that the child shoots in that world. He harasses alternatively the two mothers with his camera. On his side, the director, perversely too, plays the same game with the spectators, moving the camera menacingly. We are introduced into two houses abundant in statues, paintings, mirrors, that duplicate "reality", and revive in us the ancestral fear before images of resemblance (those obvious elements of cinema) and some inanimate objects that seem to earn life. Ruiz has said in an interview that all his features, and he shot dozens of them, have "film" as their theme. The child uses the camera not only for reproducing but for torturing, and the mothers are ready to collaborate providing that the child will choose just one of them ( see the last scene, for instance). The need of possession and the anguish of abandonment succeed in impregnating each one of the characters, driving them to incredible behavior. The supposed legitimate mother (if there is a legitimate identity in the world of this movie) not only tries to recuperate her son, but to become even the fantasized mother. Ruiz plays convincingly with the impossible until a denouement that dubiously gives resolution to mystery. Like the young nanny who when throwing the dice gets the same results, the picture doesn't cease astonishing the viewers.

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2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
A beautiful film of Chielan director Raul Ruiz, 30 January 2006
8/10
Author: mateorau from Chile

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

A beautiful film of Chilean director Raul Ruiz; which transports to us through the peculiar world of the Camille young person. It is a new birth as it says well, nine years is serious thing: like all birthday. The glance of Camille is surrealist, is happened to him that her mother no longer is so, but so single a name (Ariane). And with her, it is directed in adventures in search of his mother, who the delay in a place very far. This is the real adventure that my proposes to us - to seem Raoul Ruiz, everything is not imagination neither surrealism, the Camille young person does not try fantasies nor whims as all adult tries to include/understand. Then or it is included/understood or it is not taken care of..., but what it is what happens when the no-reality is approached to us, and falls finally in our same refuges? Different perspective. A very safe one, the one of Camille... its tapes shows the world that sees us... from there down, where the chairs are castles... and the smoke ghosts... On the other hand, the drama... that always remembers thanks to us to the guessed right sound track, the mother who loses her son: and what is worse, it is not kidnapping. one goes away because it must go away more above... and, will really be his mother? The summary appears to us during the film, both faces turn and they appear before the judgment of Salomón... the watching doubt...: to whom to believe? who decides? The negative: The robust step of the fantasy to the reality... the alive explanation of a tragic picture... But really, cinema of which it is possible to be seen more of twice...

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2 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Pretty good psychological thriller, 16 June 2001
Author: Corto_Maltese from Montréal, Québec, Canada

Shortly after his 9th birthday, Camille tells his mother that he is Paul, the son of another woman, and asks to be reunited with her. She humours him and plays along, but starts to worry when she realizes that Camille and his "new mother" are quite serious.

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4 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
French Letter, 3 April 2006
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

I'm beginning a serious affair with Ruiz and what an adventure it is turning into!

I originally was directed to Ruiz because of my public esteem for Greenaway; several readers suggested Ruiz. Ruiz clearly comes from the Latin tradition of floating narrative, where layers and magical realities penetrate each other. Where sex and related emotions weave with intellectual perspectives. Where floating without anchors beyond the anchor of lightness itself is the very idea of life.

Medem is the one I appreciate the most in this Latin world, though there are many others and I suppose the future of film now — the next episode at least — is in their hands.

Its in the nature of this floating for some artists to fold in layers of extreme self-reference, including notions of what constitutes art, the instant artifact, and in other directions, essays on illusive realities and the charms or multilayered love.

Greenaway is something a bit different. His floating is usually bipolar, between the Latin layers on one hand, soft and ephemeral and impulsive — and codified frameworks on the other. Frameworks like ordering systems and symmetric containers. Cosmological and human machines for managing reality. The written word, itself dual. For Greenaway, it has to be an artifact first for him to escape the nature of artifacts.

Ruiz superficially appears similar, but in fact he inhabits a whole different world. Where Greenaway registers against geometric cosmologies, Ruiz simply works within the form of French cinema. It makes him less because French cinema — how to say this gently — is bankrupt. Yet, like modern religions of the book, it refers to times and frames of vitality.

Yet, it is a haunting notion, to bring this layered Latin floating of realities to a form that supposes that there is only one layer in life and that it is light, somewhat capricious and animated by the female urge.

What we have in this film is a space where every character is creating multiple realities: each person is in control and mad at the same time. In control, because he or she creates the realities we see. Mad because they cannot control them or separate them. each of these reflects into the artifact of the film.

We have the boy, who is an obsessive filmmaker, already by his ninth birthday his life and film have merged. He splits into three persons: the one his mother bore, a second one another woman had and lost and a third, Alexander, seen as imaginary by his mother.

We have the mother (a theater designer and painter) from whose perspective she splits into two women, both vying for the boy who died two years ago. One reality of this woman is that she is simply floating, French-wise, though intimate peelings that reveal ever more soft a soul. Another is that she is the other woman, a violinist inmate in a madhouse where she imagines her doctor to be her brother. She sees the madhouse as the family home, the other inmates as statues.

There's Serge, who the mother sees as her brother and in her other self as the psychiatrist of the madhouse. He is the fellow who sees. He blends with the boy, their toy-films are shared. It is because of Serge's lunchtime screws with the housekeeper/governess that the boy is unattended and drowns.

This is the French core, sex generated folded realities. In the DVD extras Ruiz says he had to do it this way because it is "against the law" to have ghosts in French films. That young sexy girl is the fulcrum of the thing, her torso locked in throwing the dice and always getting the same number, what she calls "inverted probabilities."

It isn't lifealtering stuff. But it is fine, Very fine, the house as the character.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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1 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Difficult to believe in such a strange mixture of emotions, 12 June 2003
7/10
Author: raymond-15 from Australia

Ariane (Isabelle Huppert) mother of young Camille has a frustrating problem on her hands. Her son says that she is not his real mother and that his real mother lives in another part of town. Also he insists that Ariane take him to her. What has happened to parental control? Mother and son seek her out. Her name is Isabella ( Jean Balibar) and she had a son Paul the same age as Camille but he was lost in a drowning accident. From this moment on Isabella seems to take over insisting Camille is Paul and Camille insisting that she is his mother.

It's very unlikely to happen in real life and the whole set-up is rather laughable. Things get worse when Isabella moves into Ariane's home to be near her so-called Paul. While there she tries to seduce Georges. "Why are you doing this?" he asks".....I need a father for my son" Because Isabella is so difficult to get rid of, family and friends suspect she could be a witch. Need I go on?

The acting is excellent throughout. Huppert so gracious and serene, and Balibar well cast as the post-traumatic mother with her ever too ready smile. The dialogue is strange. Many sentences are unfinished. Many idea are not resolved. There is a vague feeling of inactivity and helplessness. The au pair is strange and loves to play the dice. The whole house is littered with busts of men and women so weird-looking in the shadowy light of evening. Great for atmosphere but surely difficult to live with. No wonder the household was a trifle mad.

One scene tends to send shivers down one's back. It's when Isabella decides to re-enact the drowning of her son by dunking Camille off the side of the barge. She is completely crackers...quite pathetic really.

Camille's favourite plaything is a video camera which he likes to poke into everybody's face. It is said the camera does not lie and in this case what is captured on video happens to resolve the situation.

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2 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Spooky and Strange..., 21 January 2005
4/10
Author: robertconnor from England

On his birthday a small boys tells his mother he is not her son, and that he wants to go home to his real mother.

In some ways Comedy De L'Innocence feels like it comes from a different time of movie-making, perhaps the 60's or 70's. Certainly it reminded me of Losey's Secret Ceremony (1968), and Richard Loncraine's Full Circle (1977), both of which deal with loss, grief and relationships between parents and 'lost' children (curiously both films star Mia Farrow).

All three films are populated with unsympathetic characters who behave in strange and unexplained ways. All three films have a chilly feel, both emotionally and literally. All three films focus on mother-child relationships, and ultimately all three films pose the question - 'what is real, what is imagined?'

Beautiful but flawed, it offers no easy answers and leaves much hanging, unexplained and strange.

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1 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Clumsy as a thriller, but interesting as a psychological essay, you have to work too hard and there's an alternative, 19 November 2003
4/10
Author: Framescourer from London, UK

On the face of it, Ruiz has set out to make a psychological thriller. Although it's not as satisfying as a classic piece in that genre, there are compensations. The tensions generated between Huppert and Balibar as women calmly but calculatingly at war over a boy they both claim are compelling; however, in a true European art-house style, Ruiz doesn't give us release of this tension as the women alternately also try to behave compassionately towards each other. The only raised voice is that of Huppert's waking from a nightmare (an uncontested irrational event in the film).

In fact, if we follow the title, the film is as little about its thriller skeleton as Jane Campion's In The Cut. Instead it is an intergender psychological study focusing on men. The boy, Camille (Nils Hugon), decides on a practical joke, playing his mother off against an emotionally vulnerable other woman. Both women seem to pander to him rather than scold and this compounds the problem. In the background is an intemperate psychologist (Charles Berling), swift to confront the women in his life - his sister Huppert, the nanny or his pa - and so acting as a symbolic adult counterbalance to the, calm and (we learn) manipulative Camille. It is particularly interesting that, like the father in Henry James' The Turn of The Screw, Denis Podalydes' law-enforcer Father is absent for the duration of the film. Ruiz fashions an Oedipal moment out of Huppert's reaction to his return at the film's close.

Read either as a thriller or as a psychiatric essay, this film is ultimately rather disappointing. I'm officially rather fed up with Mme Huppert's screen method, which is too buried and so I'll be looking to see her on stage before I come back to her (European - enjoyed Heaven's Gate) films again. The support is good. Ruiz does the cast no favours though. Quite apart from some poor lighting and some wilfully odd shots, its as if his direction has left characterisation quite out of reach - I'm thinking particularly of Edith Scob's Shamanic neighbour to Isabelle, who acts knowing but communicates bafflement. The set pieces do not link up to a forward driving plot - the tension I have already referred to is not only weakly dissipated but wasted in its directional potential.

Want to see a good contemporary French thriller? Go and see L'Appartement instead. 4/10

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