Impardonnables (2011) - film review

Francis, a French author, arrives in Venice to write his next novel.  His first task is to find a place to rent where he can work in peace.  He meets Judith, an estate agent, who suggests that he visits an isolated house on the island of Sant’Erasmo.  Francis agrees to rent the house, on condition that Judith lives with him as though they were a couple.  Francis soon discovers that it is hard to work when he is in love.  The next summer, the writer’s daughter Alice goes missing whilst on holiday and Francis finds that he is in great danger...

André Téchiné’s spirited attempt to unravel Philippe Djian’s convoluted novel Impardonnables and refashion it in his own cinematographic image goes somewhat awry in this, his latest film, but not through want of trying.  Djian is one of those authors whose work seems strangely reluctant to migrate from the printed page to the big screen.  Despite his immense popularity in France, only two of his novels have so far been adapted for cinema: 37°2 le matin (1986) and Bleu comme l’enfer (1986), directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and Yves Boisset respectively.   Djian’s intricately plotted novel about inter-generational conflict set in the Basque country is mutilated almost beyond recognition as Téchiné relocates it to a sunny backwater of Venice and tries to make it more of a character piece than it really deserves to be (a phrase involving a silk purse and a sow’s ear springs to mind).  The labyrinthine plot (which is essentially all there is to the original novel) hardly seems to appeal to Téchiné, and so it is hardly surprising that the film just seems to collapse into a mass of half-heartedly pursued plot strands, mired in the kind of contrivances that would scarcely make it into a third rate soap opera.

Were it not for the sheer artistic skill of Téchiné and his cinematographer Julien Hirsch it is doubtful that the film would have made it out of the editing suite.  Impardonnables may lose its way with its ungainly mass of narrative threads, poorly developed secondary characters and relentless barrage of ludicrous plot developments, but what it does have by way of compensation is a sense of artistic coherence.  Throughout, the film is infused with a haunting lyrical quality, a sense of yearning, which comes partly from the stunningly beautiful setting (a remote island situated at the northern extremity of the Venetian lagoon) and partly from Téchiné’s flair for sophisticated cinematic storytelling, in particular, the way in which a character’s inner world is subtly revealed to us through his or her surroundings.  This is especially noticeable at the start of the film, where the haze of melancholia that seems to follow the two main characters (admirably portrayed by André Dussollier and Carole Bouquet) says all we need to know about them and makes their ensuing emotional entanglement easily comprehendible.  Unfortunately, Téchiné finds it hard to sustain this level of character involvement in such a complex narrative and it isn’t long before the manic plot bifurcations get in the way and start ripping to pieces whatever artistic vision the director may have had in mind.  Impardonnables feels uncomfortably like what it is - an awkward marriage between a serious auteur filmmaker and a populist genre that was bound to end in tears.  Téchiné’s ill-judged Venetian digression may take some time for him to live down.

© James Travers 2011

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