Review: Gilles’ Wife

Call it Through a Glass Fatuously.

Gilles’ Wife
Photo: IFC Films

Though indiscriminately set in a French mining town in the 1930s, Frédéric Fonteyne’s synthetic follow-up to 1999’s An Affair of Love seems to be inspired by the stark and commanding New German cinema of Fassbinder and Herzog. A strange and spiritless combo of Fear of Fear, The Merchant of Four Seasons, and Woyzeck, Gilles’ Wife casts Emmanuelle Devos as a pregnant housewife who tends in equal parts to a garden adjacent to her home and the suspicions that her husband Gilles (Clovis Cornillac) may be having an affair with her sister Victorine (Laura Smet). Everyone is mad to some degree but Fonteyne fails to ground the obsessions and bourgeoning lunacies of his characters in a palatable sense of time and place. Though the story’s many quiet stretches allow Devos to really flex her acting muscles, her character’s twistedness remains incredulous. But the blame scarcely belongs to the actress, who isn’t responsible for the script’s simplification of female subjectivity. The film should reflect upon its lower-class milieu and emotional history of its characters—instead, it mirrors its own virtuosity. Gilles’ Wife is all pretty gels and filters; Virginie Saint-Martin’s camerawork may be succulent but it’s also unimaginative, giving off the unfortunate sheen of a sweaty, horned-up Euro-trash television commercial, sans the phallic fruits and vegetables. Call it Through a Glass Fatuously.

Score: 
 Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Clovis Cornillac, Laura Smet  Director: Frédéric Fonteyne  Screenwriter: Frédéric Fonteyne  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.