"I love secrets"
-Claudia
I was semi-interested in seeing this film, i had herd a couple of things about it but really i knew very little about the movie. I remember it premiering at Venice where it didn't make much of a splash and it continued throughout Europe in many more festivals and it's now been released in the U.S. The picture is directed by a highly regarded French director whose work was basically unknown to me so i thought i would give this film a chance and who knows maybe i would be surprised.
Jealousy is Directed by Philippe Garrel and it stars Louis Garrel, Anna Mouglalis, Emanuela Ponzano and Arthur Igual. "A 30-year-old man lives with a woman in a small, furnished rental. He has a daughter by another woman - a woman he abandoned. A theatre actor and very poor, he is madly in love with this other woman. She was once a rising star, but all offers of work have dried up. The man does everything he can to get her a role, but nothing works out. The woman cheats on him. And then she leaves him. The man tries to kill himself, but fails. His sister visits him in hospital. She's all he has left - his sister and the theatre."
I went into the this picture without much of an expectation, i had heard that this was not the directors best work but i was still hopeful that this would be a pleasant experience, but unfortunately i can not say that. This was a little bit of a painful watch to say the truth, the movie does have it's moments but overall this picture did very little for me.
I mean i should also remind that this film has a mere run-time over 72 minutes, this is a very quick little run but unfortunately it does not feel that way. I was pretty much bored the whole way through and this felt like a long, tiresome watch. The plot is pretty simple and so are it's characters and to say the truth that's one of the problems. The film doesn't really have much of a plot, the picture is composed by episodes that have the same characters and are all within a context but they don't come together as fluently as they should, narrative wise there's a sense that the film is stuck on the same page.
I thought the story was presented in a too episodically but i think the characters themselves are not exactly exciting either. We know very little about these people, we understand little of the motivations and they never manage to pop out of the screen. They feel vague and unmemorable and i never cared for them.
I will say that the the cinematography is pretty good, it's done by legend Willy Kurant. The tone of the black and white are quite beautiful and it does capture the depressing mood of the characters. The highlights of the film are the scenes where Louis is with his daughter, those are the only joyful moments in the whole movie, where the acting and the characters fells genuine and for once i found myself attached to the screen in any way.
Jealousy addresses it's theme and plot with a surprisingly lack of melodrama which is good, but only to an extent since there is a sense of lack of emotion, the acting feels rigid, the story itself is very bleak, slow and joyless. I cared little for what i saw, i for the most part was bored, i could barely make through the 70 minutes.
Rating:C-
