La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (2000) - film review

In 1849, the calm of a small community on the bleak island St Pierre, off the coast of French Canada, is disrupted when a drunk stabs another man to death.  The killer, Neel Auguste, is condemned to death, an execution which, according to French law, must be performed with the guillotine.  The island has neither a guillotine nor executioner, but the island’s governors are undeterred.  They arrange for a guillotine to be shipped to them, although it will take several months for it to arrive.  Meanwhile, Neel Auguste has become the protégé of the prison captain and his wife, who treat him with kindness and, in return, he performs charitable acts for the community.  Within a short time, the condemned man becomes a popular member of the community, which angers the authorities.  Not only is the island’s governor determined to execute Neel, he is also resolute that the prison captain should be punished for his laxity...

Patrice Leconte’s most ambitious film to date is this haunting period drama which contrasts the simple humanity of a prison captain’s wife with the brutality of the French legal system on an outpost of the crumbling French Empire.  The harsh beauty of the snow-covered landscape provides an appropriate setting for what is at heart a melancholic cry of despair.

Although the film has little difficulty engaging and moving its audience, it does so in a very subtle way – a feature of Leconte’s best films.  As in Le mari de la coiffeuse and Monsieur Hire, to name just two, Leconte tells a tragically moving story which is effective for two main reasons.

Firstly, Leconte wisely avoids all the old clichés and pitfalls – a lesser director would have played up the sentimentality with unnecessary weepy dialogue and the usual B-movie histrionics.  As in all of Leconte’s films, dialogue is used sparingly, and it is often the photography which is used to convey meaning, even when dialogue would have been more obvious.

More significantly, Leconte intuitively knows how to use comedy to emphasise drama.  True, there is not a great deal to laugh at in this film, but there are some moments of dry wit, and on every occasion the humour works, not just to lift the mood of the piece, but to heighten the humanity of the film’s main characters.

Leconte is also rewarded from some fine performances.  Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche appear together for the first time and the pairing works surprisingly well – at some moments in the film, you could almost imagine they had been married together for several years.  It is however Emir Kusturica (the cult Bosnian film director, responsible for the remarkable 1995 film Underground) who shines brightest in this film.  His performance, earthy and restrained, is perfect for the part of the simple, almost Christ-like, Neel Auguste, making the character an easy, natural focus for our interest and compassion.

© James Travers 2001

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