REVIEW: DVD Release: I've Loved You So Long

Film: I've Loved You So Long
Release date: 9th February 2009
Certificate: 12
Running time: 117 mins
Director: Philippe Claudel
Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius, Laurent Grevill, Frederic Pierrot
Genre: Drama
Studio: Lionsgate
Format: DVD
Country: France/Germany

This critically-acclaimed, character-led French drama scooped the BAFTA for Best Foreign Film in 2009 with prizes elsewhere for its writer and first-time director Philippe Claudel plus his two leading ladies, Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein.

It is the tale of two sisters trying to rebuild their relationship after fifteen years of separation. Juliette (Scott Thomas) is haunted by the secret she hoards and weighed down by the guilt she carries for the crime that landed her in prison. Léa (Zylberstein) is younger and married with two children but is eager to bring Juliette back into the fold despite the risk of alienating her husband, Luc (Serge Hazanavicius).

So what has Juliette done - and why? Her shocking crime is unveiled as she attends job interviews, meets her welfare officer or signs in at the police station. Yet it remains unmentionable in the family home. “I was away on a long trip,” is her explanation as Léa’s daughter, P'tit Lys (Lise Ségur) innocently and enthusiastically cross-questions Juliette at the dinner table shortly after her arrival.

Léa’s hospitality and determination to shed her own guilt after being urged by her parents to disown Juliette is counter-balanced by Luc’s barely-disguised hostility – he feels he has legitimate concerns for his family’s safety. Juliette makes other more accepting acquaintances along the way – notably Léa’s colleague Michel (Laurent Grévill) and Captain Fauré (Frédéric Pierrot) – as she tries to forge a future in the shadow of her damning past…


The first thing to say about I’ve Loved You So Long is this: if you enjoy watching Scott Thomas, you’ll be in clover. Only Claudel can say whether he wrote the character of Juliette with her in mind, but it is undoubtedly a perfect fit. Few actors can convey so much while saying so little and Scott Thomas delivers a master class. Which is just as well – she’s barely off-screen.

Born in Cornwall, Scott Thomas used to be considered a quintessentially English actor, best known for her role in The English Patient. But she says she considers herself more French than British, and even offered a tongue-in-cheek apology to her legion of English fans for the increasingly Gallic flavour of her output since the turn of the century. When she produces vintage work such as this, Scott Thomas can be forgiven for that – and pretty much anything else.

This is less a story, more a study of the relationships that Juliette must tolerate and nurture as she feels her way back into society. We meet her in the first scene and it’s clear that this integration is reluctantly undertaken. Léa runs towards her in the airport but Juliette - fragile, uncomfortable and smoking incessantly - would rather keep her own counsel. Back at the house, it’s no surprise she is drawn towards Luc’s mute father, Papy Paul (delightfully played by Jean-Claude Arnaud), the one character who won’t engage her in awkward conversation.

Scott Thomas deftly takes Juliette through a subtle transition. At first, she cannot help but drag all and sundry down with her. Snapping at P'tit Lys, coldly dismissing a chance sexual conquest and sucking the enthusiasm out of her eager-to-please sister, Juliette seems intent on biting the hand that feeds.

And yet, as the days and weeks unfold, chinks of light appear through the gloom. Juliette softens, finding joy in a burgeoning relationship with P'tit Lys that is played out through piano lessons. She discovers a soulmate in Michel, reserving by far her longest and most frank utterances for him. She even becomes a crutch on which Captain Fauré can lean – a character who reminds Juliette that she is not the only tortured soul out there.

But Scott Thomas is perhaps at her best during her scenes with Hazanavicius. While Léa requires no winning over, Luc makes no secret of his mistrust and disdain for her. Juliette knows her presence exposes a fault line between her sister and brother-in-law, and it’s compelling to watch how Claudel edges Juliette and Luc towards mutual respect. Scott Thomas and Hazanavicius handle these psychological pigeon steps beautifully, not least in a stand-out scene where Luc’s frostiness thaws after a surprise request from his daughter.

It’s worth mentioning the score at this stage. For the vast majority of Claudel’s film, there is none to speak of. But during key scenes, like the aforementioned, an acoustic flourish from Jean-Louis Aubert lends weight. It’s a tribute to the acting that silence works best for the most part.

The same rule applies to Claudel’s script. Crucially it is sparse enough to allow for the speechlessness that such shocking subject matter requires. But at the same time, Claudel, a novelist for many years, manages to keep the story moving at a decent enough pace.

With Scott Thomas in such stunning form, it’s difficult to take your eyes off her. But to overlook Juliette’s fellow characters would do a disservice to a brilliant cast. Zylberstein is outstanding and utterly believable as Léa, the ‘glue’ that holds the film together. Juliette feels the deepest pain but Léa has the most to lose after risking the equilibrium of her family unit by allowing this ‘alien body’ to invade it.

Despite this obvious dilemma, Léa’s loyalty for her sibling never wanes from the moment she rushes towards Juliette in the opening scene. Getting emotionally closer will prove far tougher but Léa, with ghosts of her own to exorcise, probes for common ground as they learn to be sisters again. Inevitably, this involves reminiscing about their shared days of innocence – before Juliette’s guilt changed their lives. Léa admonishes herself for her hazy memory, knowing full well it’s the only touchstone they have.

Zylberstein plays the stoic ‘fixer’ superbly and briefly steals the show when, finally, it all gets too much and she verbally assaults one of her students while debating Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime And Punishment’ - a work of fiction with echoes of her sister’s reality. Zylberstein won the César for Best Supporting Actress for her contribution to this film - and it’s easy to see why.


When you sum up I’ve Loved You So Long, it’s clear that Scott Thomas is the heart and soul of this enthralling melodrama about guilt, grief, forgiveness and family. Claudel’s script gives her the platform to produce a career-defining performance in which every word, every expression, every sigh is measured to perfection. CH

REVIEW: DVD Release: He’s My Girl

Film: He’s My Girl
Release date: 21st March 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 100 mins
Director: Jean-Jacques Zilbermann
Starring: Antoine de Caunes, Mehdi Dehbi, Elsa Zylberstein, Judith Magre, Catherine Hiegel
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Studio: Network
Format: DVD
Country: France

It’s been over a decade since Antoine de Caunes broke through the French cinema barrier with a starring role in Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s Man Is A Woman. Zilbermann and De Caunes - who earned a Cesar nomination for his depiction of closeted, married gay man Simon Eskenazy – return with He’s My Girl, a sequel which sees Simon much more settled in his new life, and with significantly different emotional problems to conquer.

While Man Is A Woman was primarily about Simon confronting homosexuality, the allusion of gender play in He’s My Girl is a reference to Simon’s current on/off male lover Naim (Dehbi), who dresses up as a waitress for a local entertainment venue. In their early scenes together, Simon appears to be tiring of Naim and his slender, feminine frame, cooling sending him packing the morning after a sleepover. He seems much more concerned with courting the affections of young student Raphael, who’s in a relationship with a woman, but clearly struggling with his sexuality.

Simon is forced to address his living situation when his mother Bella (Magre) injures herself in a fall and moves into his home to recover. While he himself grows resentful of her presence there, Naim develops a bond with Bella, managing to convince her that he is a female law student, and eventually becomes the woman’s full-time live-in nurse.

Simon’s life is further complicated by the arrival of his estranged famous ex-wife Rosalie (Zylberstein) and Jewish convert son Yankele (Gasman), who come back into his life while on a visit from New York…


Simon’s existential crisis ceases to be about sexuality itself, but rather how to embark upon a lifestyle change, and the difficulties of trading in one rulebook for another. There’s a definite charm about He’s My Girl in the way that it doesn’t milk its characters’ faults to generate humour, more whimsically comedic as a film of little manners, rather in the vein of 1978’s La cage aux folles. It’s admirably never overwrought or gaudy with the more serious elements of the narrative, keen to focus on the intricacies of Simon’s interaction with the people in his life, hinting at the reasons why those relationships are frayed by interspersing their exchanges with sprightly quips and tense glances.

The general disappointment of the film lies is in how alarmingly ordinary it feels, even as it portrays a fanciful, occasionally interesting view of family-life. Essentially, it has a very conventional narrative, bearing overly familiar tropes of the selfishness of the bachelor; his inability to fully commit to the people around him, and a general dearth of emotional intelligence. While it maintains a flavour of camp, He’s My Girl can’t escape the pitfalls of compartmentalising its central character into a vain male paranoid jerk, who is only capable of realising what he wants when everybody else in his life bends over backwards to tell him. The film is by no means exceptionally offensive in the way that it telegraphs this philosophy, but nevertheless lacks real insight into the crux of Simon’s disconnection, surrounding him with people who rarely challenge the status quo.

He’s My Girl debilitates in impact by being too non-committal about its characters (ironic since it’s about a non-committal man in the first place), and seems continually afraid to create genuine dramatic conflict amidst this cavalcade of people who have no idea how they stand with one another. This becomes particularly clear in the weak final act, where the film admirably doesn’t make Simon’s epiphany too clear-cut, but leads us to speculate how big of an ‘epiphany’ this is in the first place.

While De Caunes is introspectively thoughtful, his character’s arc is so uninteresting, and the ensemble exhibits such a conciliatory lack of self-respect that it’s difficult to care about them at all. The weakly-conceived eventualities in the script make us dubious about how things will be better for Simon; how on earth the communication issues in his life can be resolved.


‘Competency’ shouldn’t be the primary attribute for a follow-up that promised to be so colourful, but however much He’s My Girl does the basics right, coaxing an able performance from De Caunes, and relative newcomer Dehbi, there’s an overall slightness to the film’s themes. It’s a slow-burning flaky, ineffectual tale that finds solace in not rupturing the products of the first film, without building solidly upon it, and feels strangely like a sitcom pilot with its ephemeral storm-in-a-teacup attitude to melodrama. Confidently-played, but limply finalised, He’s My Girl represents a fine look at the life of a perpetually unsettled man, but one ultimately wonders whether it’s more of a shrewd capitalisation than a natural necessity. CR

NEWS: DVD Release: He’s My Girl

Director Jean-Jacques Zilbermann revisits the life of a French Jewish musician, Simon Eskenazy (Antoine de Caunes), who was first introduced to audiences in his previous directorial feature Man Is Woman (1998).

The film opens at the point of Simon’s life where everyone important to him in his life appears to be crossing paths, not always in the most pleasant of ways. He is under the pressure of a deadline to finish his record; his mother is wheelchair-bound and shows up suddenly at his door with a suitcase and no plans to leave any time soon; he is utterly bewitched by the amazing, unpredictable, yet exciting Naim, a young Arab who seems to flit between the persona of a man and a femme fatale with incredible ease; and his ex-wife Rosalie suddenly announces her imminent visit with the 10-year old son Simon has never met.

There are also his musicians and agent to content with, and to top it all off, the cross-dressing, seductive and deeply Muslim Naim is developing a rather close friendship with Simon’s glamorous mother; not to mention Simon’s current lover Raphael, who also drops in for a visit…

He’s My Girl is full of warmth, laughter and heart and will appeal to all who enjoy a richly entertaining movie.

Film: He’s My Girl
Release date: 21st March 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 100 mins
Director: Jean-Jacques Zilbermann
Starring: Antoine de Caunes, Mehdi Dehbi, Elsa Zylberstein, Judith Magre, Catherine Hiegel
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Studio: Network
Format: DVD
Country: France