Les Âmes fortes (2001) - film review

At a wake one night in 1945, a group of aged women recall the life of one of their number.  Sixty years before, Thérèse was barely 20 years old when she eloped with her boyfriend, Firmin, a blacksmith, to Châtillon, a town in Provence.  Here, she makes the acquaintance of the wealthy Madame Numance, who is known for her good deeds.  Realising that Thérèse is pregnant and unemployed, Madame Numance insists that she moves into a house on her estate.  Whilst Firmin resents the arrangement, Thérèse soon finds that she can exploit the situation, using her benefactor’s naivety and generosity for her own gain...

Despite an impressive cast and some excellent production values, this quality adaptation of the classic French novel by Jean Giono generally fails to engage the spectator and is amongst the least satisfactory of Raoul Ruiz’s directorial efforts to date.  Visually impressive this film may be – with some beautiful photography of its Provençal setting and meticulous attention to period detail – but shallow characterisation and uneven narrative pacing make watching it a painfully empty experience.  Some clumsy directorial gimmicks, such as an attempt to create a sense of intrigue and mystery, merely get in the way of the plot, further weakening the impact of Giono’s superlative novel.

The film was originally to have been directed by its scriptwriter, Alexandre Astruc.  Raoul Ruiz stepped into the breach to direct the film when Astruc died before the film went into production, and this could account for the film’s noticeably lacklustre feel.  You get the impression that Ruiz is attempting to use a similar approach to the one he used previously on his adaptation of a Marcel Proust novel, Le Temps retrouvé (1999).  Unfortunately, all that Ruiz manages to show is that this abstract approach, where the ambiguities of human character are glimpsed through a distorting lens from a great distance, is not well suited for the historical film drama, or indeed any drama where characterisation is such an integral part of the narrative.

© James Travers 2004

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