PRISONERS OF LOVE : 'Bridget Jones's Diary' & 'The Widow of Saint-Pierre'. - Review - movie review

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Rand Richards Cooper

The movie raises the moral problem of executing a man who has reformed himself, and the populist uprising ("No guillotine on Saint-Pierre!") lends a political gloss. But Leconte's main interest lies in the curious triangle involving prisoner, benefactress, and husband. "She is governed by her passions," the captain says, defending his wife's behavior. Madame La also seems inflamed sexually by Neel, and her arousal in turn erotically charges her relations with her husband, making the two of them the object of envious tea-parlor gossip. ("We can't all have a convict around to arouse our men's flagging interest," one woman complains.)

Widow's far-north setting is forbiddingly barren, all fog and ice and stone buildings, and the film has a muted, grayed-out look, like a barely colorized photograph--the flowers Madame La and Neel cultivate, and the passions they engender, bringing heat and color to a wintry world. These frail flowers are doomed to die. Widow has the plotting of tragedy, and the look, too (there's a gorgeous, Dureresque image of Neel Auguste's hands sticking out between the bars of his cell, with Binoche kissing them). But characters' motives are left way too obscure. The captain and Madame La wonder why Neel doesn't crave his freedom. The governor and his cronies wonder why the captain can't, or won't, rein in his wife. The gossips at the cafe wonder who's sleeping with whom. Fate-sealing decisions are taken, and no one--we least of all--understands why. The Widow of Saint-Pierre is based on nineteenth-century court documents, and that's exactly how it feels, a bare-bones chronicle Leconte tries to deepen with slow, somber shots of Madame La staring out the window looking pensive, or the Captain, holding a flower, closing his eyes and inhaling with an aesthete's brooding thrill. Auteuil and Binoche give it their best, but their parts are badly underwritten; there's so little to connect the points of Madame La's impulsive actions that she comes off as bizarre, her passion and compassion swirling together in a weird, panting charity.

There are political-historical ironies here: aristocratic noblesse oblige posed against the bloodless cynicism of the magistrates, with their Second Republic anxiety over working-class radicalism; or the death sentence hanging over the republic itself, which within a year will be crushed and replaced by Louis Napoleon's Second Empire. But supplying these elements doesn't solve Leconte's problem. I kept thinking of Daniel Vigne's wonderful 1982 film, The Return of Martin Guerre, which managed to give a skeletal courtroom chronicle the flesh of human drama, while providing a tantalizing glimpse into the mindset of an historical era. The Widow of Saint-Pierre doesn't live up to its own visual power; there's so little emotional impact that the destinies plotted out become mere lines of force, tragedy's contours without its content.

A closing note: Though the two movies under review couldn't be more dissimilar, Leconte's film contains the following line: "I love you for what you are--I wouldn't change a thing." Widow portrays a time when no man would say this unless, and until, he was being led to the firing squad. Which, depending how you see things, is either a tragedy or comedy all its own.