Film Review
After an absence of almost two years Marie Gillain returns to our
screens in style, her talents exploited to the full in her role as a
headstrong champion of technological progress in this picturesque
period piece from director François-Xavier Vives.
Initially a documentary filmmaker, Vives first won acclaim for his film
1860 sur l'extrême horizon
(1995), a fascinating profile of the 19th century photographer
Félix Arnaudin. This he followed with a documentary short,
Noli Me Tangere (2003), before
embarking on his first fictional feature,
Landes, inspired by the life of one
of his illustrious forebears. Having grown up in the Landes,
Vives has formed a profound attachment to the region, and this shows in
his film, where the bleak woody setting is as much a part of its fabric
as the rocky desert landscape is in a John Ford western.
Throughout much of the 19th century, Landes was largely covered with
pine plantations, owned by wealthy landowners who treated their workers
(
gemmeurs) almost as badly as
the surfs in pre-revolutionary Russia. The period that Vives
explores in his film, the 1920s, is one where this archaic feudal system is
about to come to a dramatic end, amidst the whirlwind of social change
that swept across Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.
Caught between her family, who are determined to hold onto the ways of
the past that have made them rich, and her workers, who are hellbent on
getting a better deal for themselves, the film's heroine Liéna
is overtaken by what seems to be a fool's errand, playing with a
new-fangled invention that no one seems to be interested in:
electricity.
Through Marie Gillain's engaging and nuanced portrayal, Liéna is
revealed to be anything but a deluded fool. A driven idealist,
she will become part of the immense social changes that are taking
place around her, but because she is a mere woman, secure in her bubble
of privilege, no one can yet see this. Stubbornly dedicated to
fulfilling the ambition of her recently deceased husband (we cannot be
sure whether it is altruism that drives her on or merely devotion to
the man she has lost), Liéna finds herself alone, hemmed in on
all sides by hostile forces, and the towering pine trees that surround
her merely add to this cruel sense of isolation and confinement.
Landes is the kind of film
that French cinema has traditionally excelled in, an elegantly crafted
period drama that authentically evokes a period of French history.
Emmanuel Soyer's sombre photography of the seemingly endless pine
forests endows the film with an austere romantic quality that serves as
a visual leitmotif for the untamed, indomitable temperament of the
heroine as she pursues her seemingly futile enterprise to bring light
to a region that badly needs it. The only areas where the film
disappoints are its overly conventional mise-en-scène, which
lacks the inspired touch in all of its key dramatic moments, and
a surfeit of thinly sketched secondary characters.
Vives' two main sources of inspiration - Jane Campion's
The
Piano (1993) and Sydney Pollack's
Out of Africa (1985) - are easily
spotted, and like these two remarkable films
Landes offers a compelling
portrait of a heroic female who is driven to achieve great things
against all the odds.
© James Travers 2013
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Film Synopsis
On her husband's death, Liéna Duprat, a woman in her
mid-thirties, inherits a vast pine forest in the heart of the Landes
department of southwest France. She leaves the running of the
plantation to her estate manager, Txomin Iban, so that she can dedicate
herself to making her husband's dream a reality - to bring electricity
to the whole region. Unfortunately, this is the 1920s, a time
when women have little influence over the affairs of men.
Liéna soon finds she is opposed on two fronts, by her family who
regard her as a traitor to their class, and by her workers who see her
as a meddlesome fool. Stubbornly, she perseveres, only to discover
that there are more important battles to be fought...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.