La Vie promise (2002) - film review

Forty-something Sylvia is a prostitute working the streets of Nice.  She has a daughter, Laurence, but seems to want to have nothing to do with her.  One evening, whilst her mother is being assaulted, Laurence kills a man.  The two flee, and Sylvie decides to visit a former boyfriend with whom she had her first child.  En route, Syvlie and her daughter fall out again and go their separate paths...

Olivier Dahan’s take on the road movie begins well enough, introducing a middle-aged prostitute and portraying her estranged relationship with her daughter convincingly.  The film has a raw edge, the essence of stark social realism, yet it also possesses an abstract dream-like poetry which conveys the warped state of mind of its main protagonist.  Despite all this, the film doesn’t really develop and, as the road movie clichés mount, a sense of ennui soon starts to set in.  There’s a great performance from Isabelle Huppert – made up so that you can hardly recognise her – but even this cannot make up for the film’s killer deficiencies: underdeveloped characters, uneven pacing and a trite narrative.   Stylistically, the film has a lot going for it; what lets it down is a grim lack of content and genuine emotional engagement.

© James Travers 2005

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