L’Autre (2009) - film review

Having shared a passionate love affair, Anne-Marie and Alex decide to separate.  She wants an open relationship, but he wants her to commit herself to him.  They stay on good terms and all is well -  until Alex begins an affair with another woman.  The shock of this discovery is more than Anne-Marie can bear and jealousy gradually drives her to the brink of insanity...

Whilst some may judge L’Autre to be a film that is too stylised and self-consciously arty for its own good, others may well conclude that its distinctive design is extremely effective in expressing the inner chaos of the central protagonist as she allows herself to be propelled into an existential nightmare.   Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel L'Occupation, this is the second film to be written and directed by Patrick-Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, the team that had previously worked on the morbid and pretty bewildering Dancing (2003).

The extraordinary power of this film derives mainly from Dominique Blanc’s gripping central performance.  In one of her most challenging and fascinating roles, Blanc plays a complex Jekyll and Hyde character who is both a considerate, hardworking social worker and an obsessessive paranoiac who can’t cope with the fact that her boyfriend is attracted to another woman.  The part has striking similarities with the one which Blanc earlier played in Roch Stéphanik’s Stand-by (2000), both films involving a woman who copes with the trauma of rejection by becoming totally irrational.  The characterisation is extreme and erratic but Blanc makes it extraordinarily convincing.  Her performance won her the Volpi Cup Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2008.

There is a haunting, indeed slightly sinister poetry to this film, which comes partly from Blanc’s tortured portrayal of a woman being driven to the edge, and partly from the near-abstract design.  Long lenses transform the cold urban setting into a fuzzy neon-drenched dreamscape, emphasising the central character’s disenfranchisement with the world around her.  A discordant sound track adds to the growing sense of alienation and reinforces the impression of mental collapse that is so vividly conveyed by Blanc’s portrayal.  L’Autre is a sombre and powerful work that suggests with a chilling sense of reality the inner struggle of a woman who is being slowly consumed by jealousy and paranoia.

© James Travers 2010

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