The Line Review: Ursula Meier’s Atonal Depiction of a Mother-Daughter Turf War

The Line is unable to bring its disparate elements into a convincing totality.

The Line
Photo: Strand Releasing

The titular line of Ursula Meier’s latest refers to a blue circle painted around the home of Christina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) in order to enforce a three-month long restraining order against her daughter, Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud). Metaphorically, it’s a line between war and peace, between genuine anger and self-serving martyrdom. Or maybe it’s the line between this life and the next. That much isn’t made quite clear across a film that’s burdened by tonal incongruities, undeveloped characters, and a frustrating central metaphor.

The blue line has been painted on the ground by Christina’s youngest daughter, Marion (Elli Spagnolo), in order to protect her mother and older sister from getting into trouble with the police. Christina was once a respected classical pianist and openly blames Margaret for her failures, as the latter had the former at the young age of 20—information that we get from a clunky exposition dump that Christina practically throws at Marion during a piano lesson.

The violent attack between the two which kicks The Line into motion leaves Christina half-deaf and Margaret bloodied and stitched up, but Marion becomes the attack’s worst, if most tangential, victim. Turns out, without Margaret around and without Christina able to hear properly, the youngest of three sisters is unable to get her usual dose of musical education.

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Meanwhile, Christina’s middle child, Louise (India Hair), who’s nearing the end of her pregnancy with twins, is caught in this familial fray in both literal and figurative ways, unable to quell her mother’s petulance nor her older sister’s persistent flirtation with disaster. Though Louise sympathizes more with her mother, she, too, is frustrated with her childishness, unaware if Christina’s agony is legitimate, self-serving, or both. In order to skirt the restraining order, Margaret proposes to give Marion music lessons in secret from Christina, outdoors on the very edge of the 100-meter threshold from the house that’s marked by the blue line, which more or less becomes the battlefield and stage upon which all four women meet.

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The Line is aided tremendously by Blanchoud, who brings a complex swirl of emotions to the turbulent Margaret, and Tedeschi plays Christina with a manic frailty that toes the line between hilarious and pathetic. The problem is that neither seems to be in the same film as the other, since Meier’s script is torn, uncertainly, between a satirical depiction of familial chaos and something entirely more sobering. Certain scenes, like the opening salvo, seem potentially played for camp. Yet The Line also wishes to be taken as a grounded, interpersonal drama.

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That jarring tonality could have been interesting as a reflection, at least, of its characters’ sense of dislocation, but The Line is unable to bring its disparate elements into a convincing totality. Some of this might be helped if Meier gave us a better indication of why Christina and her daughters behave the way that they do, but the filmmaker doesn’t ever let us in on why, for one, Margaret is so prone to anger, or why the inciting incident happened in the first place.

Elsewhere, some of the film’s characters, like an aging fisherman (Jean-François Stévenin) who’s helped by Margaret, are pushed aside as soon as they’re introduced, while others are developed at barely a glance. Christina’s two lovers, Serge (Eric Ruf) and, especially, Hervé (Dali Benssalah), are the most conspicuous in that regard, since they’re prevalent in the film but seem to exist only to be sexualized by Christina. Meanwhile, Margaret’s ex-beau and music partner, Julien (Benjamin Biolay), provides a smidgen of context about her tumultuous past, and his calming energy helps as a necessary foil, but he too conspicuously exists to supply exposition.

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The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters. In the end, the film is half-baked—not quite a redemption story for Margaret, not quite a story of family reconciliation, not quite a story of music as a medicine for loneliness. Turns out, the titular line feels like the one between the film and a much more fleshed-out story that’s left tantalizingly out of reach.

Score: 
 Cast: Stéphanie Blanchoud, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Elli Spagnolo, India Hair, Dali Benssalah, Benjamin Biolay, Eric Ruf, Thomas Wiese  Director: Ursula Meier  Screenwriter: Stéphanie Blanchoud, Ursula Meier, Antoine Jaccoud  Distributor: Strand Releasing  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Greg Nussen

Greg Nussen is a Los Angeles-based critic and programmer, with words in Salon, Bright Lights Film Journal, Vague Visages, Knock-LA, and elsewhere.

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