In Your Hands

In Your Hands

Contre Toi

Directed by Lola Doillon

France, 2010

Cornerhouse, 21 July 2012

As a thriller, the film feels rather slight.

And it’s surprising that there is little sense of peril: a woman is abducted and held prisoner, after all.  However, what’s interesting here is the relationship between Anna (played by the ever watchable Kristin Scott Thomas) and her captor.  It has a curious dynamic, and even an element of tenderness and trust, which persists even after she has been released.

Anna’s ambivalence towards her experience and the way it exposes the barren terrain of her personal life is what holds your attention – and it’s what is remarkable about the film.  She is never quite able to trust another or to be content on her own.

On the other hand, you could argue that a film where a woman is abducted and imprisoned should primarily be about a woman who is abducted and imprisoned.  Not, let’s say, about the difficulty of trust and commitment in contemporary relationships between men and women.

The Woman in the Fifth

The Woman in the Fifth

Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

France, 2011

Cornerhouse, 25 February 2012

Despite several fine performances, this is a disappointing film.

It shares the same failing as Black Swan, in that implausible or weird events are explained as occurring within the mind of an unstable and quite probably insane central character.  The upshot is that you come to doubt pretty much everything that you’re seeing; and it matters not a jot.  Reality gives emotional weight to experience, and when it’s called into question, emotional investment takes flight too.

There’s good acting from Ethan Hawke as Tom, a disturbed writer, and from Kristin Scott Thomas, who’s a stunning, seductive and sinister beauty.  But the film as a whole is a falderal; you fairly soon don’t accept anything in it as real.  And it would be unable to sustain a second viewing.

Leaving by Catherine Corsini

Leaving
Directed by Catherine Corsini
France, 2009
Cornerhouse, 18 July 2010

Still from Leaving

A film that could almost be described as a bourgeois version of I am Love.

As in that film, love appears as a thunderbolt.  It is unsought for, unwelcome and unwanted, and not entirely a good thing.  Kristin Scott Thomas gives a spellbinding turn as Suzanne, an apparently content wife whose life is turned suddenly upside down.  She deserts her husband and children, relinquishing a comfortable and affluent lifestyle, in order to be with an ex-con.  Her new life is, in so many different ways, an impoverishment of her old – and the path towards it is messy, disruptive, humiliating and painful.

In a curious kind of a way, this is a religious and even a pagan film.  Love is a divine madness, unworldly in its disregard of law, morality and raw economic power.  Yet love, too, is a power in the world: it effects behaviour, changes people, makes things happen for good or ill.

Leaving is a fine film.