La Fabrique des sentiments (2008) - film review

To all appearances, Eloïse, 37, has made a success of her life.  Her job as a property lawyer in Paris gives her a decent income, independence and a chic apartment.   But, whilst happy in her professional life, she feels increasingly unfulfilled.  The one thing she does not have is love, the burning amorous passion she sees in films and reads about in books.  She needs romance, the chance to marry and start a family.  To that end, she joins a speed-dating club, seeing this as the most efficient way of meeting her soul mate.  She thinks she has struck lucky with the man this brings her into contact with.  Jean-Luc is good-looking, intelligent and considerate.  Alas, first impressions can be very deceptive.  After this disappointment, Eloïse’s confidence is further shattered when she learns that she has a tumour...

Jean-Marc Moutout’s follow-up to his well-received debut feature Violence des échanges en milieu tempéré (2003) is a similarly wry piece of social commentary, this time centred on the difficulty of forming long-term relationships in a society where individuals are increasingly unable to commit and communicate their true feelings.  As in his first film, Moutout deftly avoids the familiar clichés and offers a work that is original, humane and troubling, a kind of pungent and twisted fairytale in which a woman’s search for her Prince Charming comes close to driving her out of her mind and which ends on a note of intense irony.   Not your conventional romantic drama.

La Fabrique des sentiments is provocative, veering towards the outright cynical, but it is also astute, compelling and worryingly close to the mark in its portrayal of grown adults struggling to form an emotional bond.  The existential quandary in which the heroine finds herself as she attempts to balance her professional and emotional needs is brought home by the film’s very distinctive dreamlike composition, which blurs reality and imagination to the point that the two become indistinguishable.  Moutout’s clinically cold mise-en-scène is appropriate for the story, reflecting the dearth of romanticism and emotionality in contemporary society, and this is beautifully complemented by the arresting contributions from the three lead actors, Elsa Zylberstein, Jacques Bonnaffé and Bruno Putzulu.  

In one of her most mesmerising performances to date, Elsa Zylberstein regales us with a complex portrayal of a modern woman whose world is turned on its head when she awakens to her primitive needs, the need to commit to one individual and start a family.  Putzulu is the obvious soul mate - attractive, romantic and likeable; Bonnaffé is a far less appealing proposition - gauche, inarticulate, a tad grouchy and overbearing.   Naturally, being human and so easily seduced by today’s facile notion of where beauty lies, Zylberstein’s character is deceived by first impressions; her simplistic idea of what love looks like inevitably sends her down a few blind alleys before she reaches her final destination.  With subtlety, intelligence and barbed compassion, La Fabrique des sentiments reaffirms Shakespeare’s wise observation, that the course of true love never did run smooth, but is it also saying something more controversial, that in our atomistic, self-reliant society old fashioned notions of romance and commitment are, if not already dead, perilously close to extinction..?

© James Travers 2011

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