La Femme défendue (1997) - film review

He is 39, a successful businessman, married with a young son.  She is 22, unattached and lives alone.  They meet, become friends and before long embark on a stormy and passionate love affair.  She resents that he is not prepared to give up his wife for her.  He becomes jealous of her liaisons with men of her own age.  It is obvious that their affair isn’t going to last.  Yet they cannot separate.

La Femme défendue is a familiar tale of marital infidelity à la française, but told in the most unfamiliar way imaginable.  The entire drama is filmed literally from the point of view of the central male character, with some ingenious cinematography orchestrated to show us the world through his eyes.  For the most part, the camera is trained unblinkingly on the face of the lead actress, Isabelle Carré, as if mesmerised by her beauty and transfixed by the romantic possibilities she offers.

For the film’s director, Philippe Harel, this was a hugely risky way of making a film, but the approach works so well that it is almost inconceivable that the film could have been made any other way.  The approach was necessitated by Eric Assous’ scripts, which consisted solely of dialogue between two characters, and which provided Harrel with one of the greatest technical challenges of his filmmaking career.

Harel was fortunate to have an actress as talented as Isabelle Carré at his disposal.  She has an extraordinary ability to convey a whole range of moods and emotions through her facial expression alone and is perfectly cast as the film’s central character – in fact the only character we see for any length of time in the film.   Harel himself plays the part of the male lead, but his face is glimpsed in only two very short sequences, and on both occasions we perversely expect to see our own face, not Harel’s.  Such is the power of cinema.

The way in which the film is photographed is both unsettling and strangely corrupting for its spectator.  The first-person perspective, which is rarely used in cinema, lends the film an intensity and intimacy which genuinely does involve the audience, offering them something of a virtual reality experience in the art of seduction.  Watching this breathtakingly original film is perhaps the closest you well ever get to having an illicit love affair without actually going out and doing it for real.

© James Travers 2003

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This is an EXCELLENT movie, most of all the use of the camera in 1st person view, but also has a great story!!!!
Manuel Veray (Mexico)

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