Film Review
If the idea of a French paranormal whodunit appeals then
Écoute le temps, a promising
debut feature from Lithuanian born director Alanté
Kavaïté, is worth checking out, particularly as the
marriage of fantasy and thriller is such a rarity in French
cinema. Despite being underwritten and directed a little too
mechanically in parts Kavaïté's film is inexplicably
captivating, its languorous beginning building gradually into something
far more unsettling and original, with a climax that is a genuinely
nerve-racking experience. The nearest thing to it is Roman
Polanski's
Repulsion (1965), although
Kavaïté's approach is more coldly objective and this
slightly diminishes her film's impact. At times, the murder mystery
storyline is too vague and insubstantial to sustain the spectator's
interest and the film treads a fine line between tedium and suspenseful
weirdness. But, once you have accepted the story's
hard-to-swallow premise, namely that walls have the power to broadcast
echoes of the past,
Écoute le
temps makes compelling viewing and is certainly one of the more
successful of left-field thriller offerings to come out of France in
recent years.
The film's main asset is a riveting central performance from
Émilie Dequenne, who has not appeared so convincing nor so
committed in a role since her star-making lead in the Dardenne
brothers' highly acclaimed
Rosetta (1999). As the
whole story revolves around one character, a borderline psychotic young
woman who spends most of her time doing bizarre things with bits of
string (in what looks like a none-to-subtle homage to David
Cronenberg's
Spider (2002)),
it's pretty crucial that this character is played by someone we want to
spend time with and who can project her feelings with an arresting
sense of reality. One of the most expressive French actresses of
her generation, Dequenne has no difficulty drawing us into her
character's turbulent inner world as she becomes increasingly taken over by her
freakish murder investigation. If only Kavaïté
had been braver and made more of an effort to blur the boundary between
reality and imagination (as Polanski did so expertly in his
fantasy-thrillers) the film would have had much greater coherence and
been far more interesting.
It is not difficult to side with Dequenne and identify with her
harrowing sense of detachment from the world around her as all the
other characters in the film are so unutterably creepy. Virtually
unrecognisable in the guise of what is undeniably France's answer to
Norman Bates, sinister and likeable in equal measure, Mathieu Demy has
a haunting, almost zombie-like presence in the film, and the same could
equally be said of Ludmila Mikaël, extremely well-cast to play the
enigmatic murder victim whose hobbies include lacerating newspapers
with scissors for no apparent reason. (Whilst all is explained in
a frantically cobbled together denouement the plot might have made more
sense if Mikaël's character was genuinely unhinged.) The
other characters make a frightening entourage of paysan stereotypes -
this, and the oppressively gloomy photography, can only leave us with
the most nightmarish impression of rural France. For her first
feature, Alanté Kavaïté delivers a distinctive
lowkey thriller that, despite some obvious shortcomings, has no
difficulty tickling the fear centres of the brain. If you thought
the crumbling old house in Jean Epstein's
La Chute de la maison Usher
(1928) was scary the one that
Écoute
le temps lures us into
is
positively demonic.
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Charlotte, a young sound engineer, is shocked when she learns that her
mother has been murdered at her home in the country. Realising
that she knew nothing of her mother's life, Charlotte moves into her
farmhouse, hoping to find some trace of the woman who brought her into
the world. Whilst experimenting with her sound recording
equipment, she makes an extraordinary discovery. The walls appear
to be transmitting sounds from the past, sounds that, when assembled,
will enable Charlotte to reconstruct her mother's life. She may
even be able to learn the identity of her killer...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.