Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi (1998) - film review

Muriel is a middle-aged writer, who lives alone in a Paris apartment, having recently separated from her boyfriend.  One day, she meets a stranger on a train and she is drawn to him.  The next day, the stranger turns up unexpectedly at Muriel’s flat and they immediately make love.  The stranger tells Muriel his name, Samuel, and says that he sells carpets for a living.  The two develop a turbulent and unpredictable relationship, which soon develops into violent abuse.  Although Samuel ill-treats her, takes her money and upsets her work, Muriel is unable to break with the strange man who has entered her life – perhaps forever...

The darker side of female sexuality is explored in this intensely passionate romantic drama, which courts controversy in virtually every scene.  Filmed with a shocking explicit realism, it is not a comfortable film to watch, and many will condemn it for its depiction of a woman offering herself as a willing participant in a violent sexual relationship.

The film is directed by Jeanne Labrune, a writer-director with fewer than half a dozen films to her name.  Despite Labrune’s comparative inexperience, her direction shows a surprising degree of maturity and subtlety, as does her writing.

The film is shot from a female perspective, which is good in that it reinforces Nathalie Baye’s remarkable performance and lends the piece cohesion and credibility.  The downside is that the male characters are portrayed as exaggerated stereotypes, and you could even say that the film is excessively demeaning towards men.  The main male character, Samuel, is obsessed with physical love and comes across as six foot tall phallus - the audience is not really given much of a chance to develop much empathy with the character, despite a very creditable performance by Daniel Duval.  The lesser male characters are each subjugated and humiliated in other ways, and this is to the film’s detriment.

For those who are not put of by the film’s strong feminine bias, or by the explicit images of sex and violence (some of which really are grotesque), this should be a compelling film, which builds to a tense thriller-like ending.

© James Travers 2000

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