L'Astragale (2015)
Directed by Brigitte Sy

Film Review

After her promising debut feature Les Mains libres (2010), actress-turned-director Brigitte Sy goes into retro mode with a vengeance with her second film, an intense romantic drama based on Albertine Sarrazin's autobiographical novel L'Astragale.  First published in 1965, Sarrazin's provocative novel was both a critical success and a bestseller, and was soon adapted into a film of the same title by director Guy Casaril, starring Marlène Jobert and Horst Buchholz.  Avoiding the lurid excesses of Casaril's 1969 film, Sy brings a blistering female sensitivity to her interpretation of the novel, whilst adopting a style that somehow manages to evoke both the gritty French thrillers of the 1950s and stylishly seductive romances of the French New Wave - a kind of Du rififi chez les hommes meets La Peau douce.

The film probably owes its crisp Nouvelle Vague look to Sy's association with the auteur filmmaker Philippe Garrel, who, a self-proclaimed disciple of Jean-Luc Godard, has favoured monochrome over colour in recent years. Sy not only appeared in several of Garrel's films - including his best work J'entends plus la guitare (1991) - but is also the mother of his two children, Louis and Esther Garrel, both of whom appear in her film. The script was co-authored with Serge Le Peron, a former critic on the Cahiers du cinéma whose own films include the idiosyncratic thrillers L'Affaire Marcorelle (2000) and J'ai vu tuer Ben Barka (2005).  By stripping down Sarrazin's novel to the bare essentials, Sy and Le Peron deliver a vivid romance entwined with a powerfully moving character study about a woman striving to free herself from the yoke of male dominance in a world where women are expected to be subservient to the male sex.

L'Astragale could so easily have been a barren exercise in style if Sy had not had the good fortune to cast two remarkable actors in the lead roles - Leïla Bekhti and Reda Kateb, last seen together in Jacques Audiard's Un prophète (2009).  Over the past half-decade, Bekhti and Kateb have risen to become two of French cinema's most highly regarded actors, and their chalk-and-cheese pairing in Sy's film as two star-crossed lovers set on a course for destruction is nothing less than inspired.  The barely contained passion of Bekhti's rebellious proto-feminist makes a stark contrast with Kateb's more distant outlaw, and whilst these can't help resembling classic noir archetypes, both actors give them a strikingly modern resonance.  It is to the film's detriment that the secondary characters are underwritten to the extent that they barely register, but with two such captivating lead actors this hardly matters.  L'Astragale is an elegantly crafted cri de coeur in which a woman's contradictory yearning for domination and liberation are expressed with a searing authenticity.

Film Synopsis

One night in April 1957, 19-year-old Albertine climbs over the wall of the prison where she has been serving a sentence for robbery.  In the fall, she breaks a bone in her foot.  Luckily Julien is there to come to her aid; he takes her to a friend in Paris where she can lie low.  As her saviour resumes his criminal life in the provinces, Albertine recuperates in the capital.  After Julien has been arrested and imprisoned, Albertine has to keep moving to avoid falling into the hands of the police.  Inevitably, she is drawn into a life of prostitution so that she can survive and remain at liberty...