Le Quatrième morceau de la femme coupée en trois (2007) - film review

Louise Coleman, a 30-something daydreamer, believes that a driving licence will give her more freedom than she enjoys at present.  When she passes her driving test, she is disappointed to find that this is not the case.  The experience of locking herself out of her car brings back childhood memories of insouchiant car journeys in the company of her mother...

Le Quatrième morceau de la femme coupée en trois...  A film with such an intriguing title can hardly fail to be a cinematic oddity, and, if critical reaction to it is anything to go by, it certainly lives up to its promise.  The film’s subject matter could not be more banal.  A scatterbrained young woman locks herself out of her hire car  whilst shopping and goes slowly bananas whilst waiting for someone to turn up with a duplicate key.  When her knight in shining armour fails to put in an appearance, she settles down on a bench with a cuddly elephant and relives some happy childhood memories.  What could be more ordinary?   Yet, incredible as it may seem, this is far from being an ordinary film...

So what is this film meant to be?  An existential study of a woman coping with the traumas of mid-life crisis, a post-modern reaction to feminism, or a dark satire on the stresses and strains of modern life...?   And how are we to interpret the title?  Just what is the fourth part of a woman cut in three?   The more you try to analyse and rationalise the film, the more mystifying and complex it appears.  Your first impression is that this is a conventional shoestring budget French film d’auteur, an exercise in what the French would glibly term nombrilisme, navel gazing.  But first impressions can be deceptive and as you succumb to this film’s subtle charms you begin to experience something much more profound. Listen carefully and you may just hear the silent scream of a soul pining for an unattainable freedom.  (Either that or I desperately need to get my ears syringed.)

This remarkable film was directed by Laure Marsac, her first feature.  Prior to this Marsac had pursued a successful acting career, having debuted in Jacques Doillon’s La Pirate (1984), in a role that won her the Most Promising Actress César in 1985.  The skill and refreshing originality of Marsac’s work reveal a novice director of surprising confidence and maturity, an auteur in the kindest sense of the term.  Overlaying her film’s striking realism is a strangely indefinable poetry that gradually draws us into the troubled inner world of the main protagonist (who is sympathetically played by Marsac herself).  The static camerawork of the first (main) part of the film emphasises the exquisite dullness of everyday life, making a stark contrast with the balletic artistry of the dreamlike concluding sequence in which the heroine revisits happier days on a Route Nationale.  Witty, yet poignant, alluring, yet elusive, Le Quatrième morceau de la femme coupée en trois is a spellbinding, masterfully composed work that is both an enigma and a delight.

© James Travers 2010

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