Ici-bas (2012) - film review

1943, towards the end of the Occupation.  Sister Luce is an exemplary nun and nurse at a hospital in Périgueux.  Her meeting with a priest involved with the resistance will have a profound impact on her.  It is the start of a passionate affair that will cause her to break her vows and leave her convent.  But Lucie is too quick to give into her passions and disappointment soon follows.  Betrayed, she feels she has been abandoned by both God and man.  One morning, postal workers working for the resistance intercept an anonymous letter addressed to the German commandant...

The conflict between love, faith and duty provides Jean-Pierre Denis with the starting point for his most arresting film to date, a film that is apparently based on a true story that took place during the Second World War in the Périgord region of France.  Denis is not the most prolific of filmmakers - in the past three decades he has made just six films.  But he has won acclaim at home and abroad for his distinctive brand of realist cinema, in such films as Les Blessures assassines (2000) and La Petite Chartreuse (2005).  With its authentic period setting and raging torrent of emotional themes, Ice-bas is his most ambitious film so far and parallels with some of Maurice Pialat’s later films - notably Sous le soleil de Satan (1987) - are easily drawn.

Whilst the wartime setting provides a suitably dramatic backdrop to the film, and also a pretty grim denouemenet to the story, Jean-Pierre Denis does not dwell on the historical context and focuses more on the universal story that lies at the heart of the drama - an amour fou that turns horribly sour.  Denis has been criticised for his minimalist mise-en-scène, which can be misinterpreted as a reluctance to engage fully with the subject matter of his films.  Here, his understated approach works perfectly and gives his superb lead actors - Céline Sallette and Eric Caravaca - the opportunity to seize our attention and  play havoc with our emotional apparatus through their arresting portrayals of two profoundly complex characters struggling to reconcile their beliefs with their amorous instincts.  Denis directs the film almost as a piece of theatre, allowing his actors to take control and drive the narrative, rather than jumping in (as far too many filmmakers are prone to) and making his auteur presence more strongly felt.  Denis has much in common with Pialat.

Whilst the film deals with familiar themes, its handling of the different facets of love is refreshingly raw and nuanced, although much of the complexity appears to lie beneath the surface and unless you pay attention and engage fully with the drama you risk dismissing it as superficial. Sister Luce’s conflation of romantic love with religious devotion mirrors Martial’s dedication to the Resistance cause (by serving man, he is serving God), but whereas the former is revealed to be a dangerous and selfish delusion that can lead only to Hell, the latter is shown to be the place where true goodness lies.  The sublime sensitivity of the performances jars a little with the coarseness of the narrative trajectory - of course the story has to end tragically, but in doing so it offers no chance of redemption for its flawed protagonist.  In adhering so faithfully to the story that inspired the film, Jean-Pierre Denis sacrifices poetry for realism, but his film is nonetheless an engaging and mature piece of cinema, a haunting evocation of the destructive power of love that is rendered utterly beguiling by Céline Sallette’s outstanding central performance.

© James Travers 2012

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