Les Soeurs Brontë (1979) - film review

In a remote English village of the 1840s, three sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne – live a simple life with their brother, Branwell, and their father, the pastor Patrick Brontë.  Although compelled to take up posts as governesses or private tutors, the four loyal siblings continue to nurture their artistic aspirations.  Branwell’s poems are beginning to interest other writers and each of the three sisters has published a successful novel.  But then tragedy strikes.  After a disastrous love affair with an older woman, Branwell succumbs to drugs, drink and depression.  Soon after his death, Emily and Anne are struck down by tuberculosis.  Will Charlotte’s lot be any better...?

André Téchiné directs this intensely sombre portrait of the famous Brontë sisters with a love of his subject and an acute artistic vision.  The film’s heavy, repressive mood evokes the harshness and injustice of the life that the Brontë sisters endured.  The passion and colour that is so vivid in their novels was absent from their daily existence, and the film’s appropriately gloomy cinematography – which uses dreary earth colours to emphasise the cold, remote feel – brings this home with great poignancy.

The film’s main asset is its extraordinary cast.  What a casting coup to put Isabelle Adjani, Marie-France Pisier and Isabelle Huppert in the shoes of the Brontë sisters – three, by now, near-legendary actresses playing three of the most important figures in English literature.  Each gives a superlative performance; each strengthens the bleak mood of the piece; each portrays a soul of incalculable fragility and insight.   No, it is impossible to imagine this film without three such magnificent actresses.

For the part of the Brontë’s brother, Branwell, Téchiné cast the then comparatively unknown actor Pascal Greggory.  In this role, possibly the most complex and interesting figure of the film (partly because so little is known about the character), Greggory excels, giving a hauntingly introspective performance which provides a dark focus for the narrative.  Branwell’s love interest is played by the wonderful Hélène Surgère, a renowned character actress whose performances are characterised by great inner force and emotional depth.

Téchiné originally intended to make the film earlier than he did.  In 1974, he wrote a script with Marilyn Goldin on the life of the Brontë sisters, but this was abandoned.  Having completed his 1976 film Barocco, Téchiné returned to the subject and developed a revised script with Pascal Bonitzer, a critic on the Cahiers du cinema.

© James Travers 2004

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