La Petite Chartreuse (2005) - film review

Pascale is an out-of-work actress who lives alone with her eight year old daughter, Eva.  She isn’t the most attentive of mothers and, one day, she forgets to collect Eva from school.  Anxious that she has been abandoned, the little girl runs into a busy road – and is knocked down by a car.  The driver, Étienne Vollard, can hardly take in what has happened.  It is the latest in a series of disasters that has made him a virtual recluse.  With Eva in hospital in a deep coma, her mother doesn’t know how to react, and appeals to Étienne to stay with the child.  Whilst Pascale is away looking for work, Étienne recites stories to the sleeping Eva.  Then, against the odds, the little girl begin to awake...

La Petite Chartreuse is a sombre meditation on solitude from the perspective of three very different people, each of whom has been deeply scarred by his or her personal experiences.  There is a middle-aged man who has barely recovered from the alcoholism that drove away his wife, a young woman who, no more than a girl herself, has had to bring up a young child alone, and the child who has to live through the trauma of a terrible road accident.  Each one of the characters seems to be locked in the interior world, unable to make contact with the world outside.  They are all in some kind of waking coma, and it is doubtful whether any of them will recover.

The film is loosely adapted from a novel by Pierre Péju and was directed by Jean-Pierre Denis, his fifth film in twenty-five years.  Appropriately for its dark and intimate subject, Denis adopts a stark naturalistic approach which is very effective at conveying the sense of isolation and vulnerability each of the three characters has to live with.  Olivier Gourmet’s portrayal of Etienne is particularly memorable.  The actor is renowned for his convincing performances in this kind of film, and he is very much the focal point of the film, to the extent that the part of Pascale is almost reduced to that of a secondary character – which is probably a mistake, since we are not given the opportunity to compare the two characters in any great depth.

The first half of the film is totally absorbing and very nearly faultless.  Watching Etienne come to terms with what he has done and then seeing him, reluctantly, take the place of the mother who just cannot cope offers an experience for the spectator which is as harrowing as it is poignant.  Whilst the dominant mood of the film is its bleakness there are some moments of tenderness, as Etienne and Eva awaken in one another some vestige of human feeling.  The problem is that towards the end, Jean-Pierre Denis seems to eschew realism for plot contrivances in a slightly botched and misguided attempt to tie up the narrative.   There’s no need for Pascale to have any deep feelings for Etienne and the scene where they end up rolling about in the grass is as absurd as it is unnecessary.  Likewise, the final, Jack-London-inspired, chapter in the drama, whilst poetic, feels horribly false, an almost total rejection of the realism and restraint that make the first part of the film so truthful and engaging.

© James Travers 2007

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