Le Septième ciel (1997) - film review

On the surface, Mathilde is a happily married young woman, working in her mother’s law office whilst her husband pursues a successful career as a surgeon.  Yet she is scarred by her childhood recollections of her father’s death, which is beginning to manifest itself in her frustrated sex life and frequent bouts of fainting.  By chance, she meets a strange middle-aged man who starts to offer her a course of hypnotherapy.  As Mathilde’s condition improves, her husband’s suddenly starts to deteriorate…

Le Septième ciel is characteristic of Benoît Jacquot’s individual style of cinema, a compelling portrait of troubled yet seemingly ordinary individuals who find themselves driven to the edge by events beyond their control.  The plot references to mysticism and Oriental healing techniques are reflected in the film’s unusual style, which manages to combine an acute sense of realism with hazy dream-like asides.  This conveys a very palpable sense of disorientation, allowing the spectator to see the world through the eyes of film’s two lead characters, and hence form a tangible bond of attachment with them.  This is what cinema should be about – discovering inventive new techniques for communicating with an audience without obviously subordinating the film’s content to cinematic style.

Although low-key and largely uneventful, the film has little difficulty sustaining its audience’s attention.  This is in part down to its unusual visual style (which offers a refreshing variant on the psychological drama genre), but also because of the exceptional performances from its lead actors, Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon.  Kiberlain, renowned for playing unconventional strong female leads, is perfectly cast as Mathilde, conveying both the absurdity and tragedy of her character’s predicament in equal measure. Vincent Lindon is no less impressive and it is the strength of his performance, forceful yet restrained, which makes the latter half of the film so compelling and poignant.

One of Benoît Jacquot’s most striking and unusual films to date, Le Septième ciel is a work that appears to defy analysis but yet appears to say so much about contemporary life.  In its depiction of a married couple experiencing an inexplicable domestic rift, it is convincing yet also strangely mysterious.  Although superficially very simple, it soon becomes apparent that this is a film with hidden depths, where the divisions between comedy and drama, between reality and fantasy, are subtly blurred, and nothing is really quite what it seems.

© James Travers 2002

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