If you want to see wonderful acting, Patrice Chéreau's new adaptation of the Conrad story about the disintegration of a marriage is essential viewing.
It's like a very French version of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage: more stylised but no less emotionally riveting.
The husband and wife (Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert) are a successful couple who hold soirées in the Paris of the Belle Epoque. He is selfsatisfied, secure in the knowledge that he has a suitable wife and totally unprepared when she leaves a note saying she's gone.
She is a sophisticated and beautiful woman in a loveless marriage, who in the end can't muster the emotional effort to leave it. She returns, hoping he hasn't yet seen the note. He is angry and bitter but also on the brink of hysteria, especially when he discovers that the man she was going to is one of the most despised of their regular guests.
Both Greggory and Huppert play their parts with enormous distinction-while Chéreau and Eric Gautier, his cinematographer, summon up their emotions and the period with stunning precision. This is a film which could have been an evening in the theatre or even a radio play. But such is Chéreau's command that it seems entirely right for the cinema.
If Chéreau's Intimacy shocked audiences in 2001, Gabrielle worms its way into the watcher's mind with even more power as its director and two principals illustrate what Chéreau calls "the muffled violence of a civil war".
Gabrielle
Cert: 15
