Slow to learn.

Today amidst the heat and insanity going on in NYC I dragged my tired feet over to IFC to catch a showing of "Gabrielle" a new French movie that just opened there. Let me just preface this by saying that I think the last foreign movie I saw in the theater may possibly have been Amelie; I just don't usually feel an urge to escape to a movie in another language. I was just looking around online this morning and saw a few pictures and reviews of this movie and decided it was going to be my solo afternoon excursion.

The movie was really beautiful and for more reasons than just the cinematic beauty it displayed. Americans would never make a film like this because its almost too "still" of a story for American audiences. While the story is something we have seen before, the unraveling of a marriage, the way it is presented is completely different. The whole film is almost all scenes between Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory as they painfully come to the realizations that they are in a loveless marriage. The script was almost poetic in its phrasing and having the subtitles along with the picture presented two distinct views of the action. It was a battle between their body language as actors and the words they were given. I have this obsession with watching people's eyes when they are on stage or screen and Isabelle Huppert has some of the most amazing ones I have ever seen. She cries with such resigned torment buried inside of her that her calm demeanor is only interrupted by the soft tears spilling over onto her cheeks. It's an interesting story because basically nothing happens yet I was transfixed. It was cinematic while also feeling extremely real and the fact that they didn't bury the story in a difficult busy plot was what was most un-American about it. It was more just a psychological unraveling of a ten-year relationship than a huge melodrama.

It makes a couple of interesting comments about passivity and what its effect can be on our lives. Had the wife just spoken up about her unhappiness years before instead of existing like some statue within her own house, she would have been liberated and actually been able to exist. She has this incredible scene in her bathroom where she breaks down in front of her maid and the pain that she digests as she realizes that she was just slow to learn her own feelings is heartbreaking. As much as we may try to ignore the voices in our head they will get out at some point and it's better to listen when they are whispering than to wait until they are screaming.