Filmmaker Diane Kurys examines the bittersweet friendship of two women (Isabelle Huppert and Miou Miou) during post-World War II France in this semi-autobiographical account of her mother and father. The women struggle with their dreams and identities, compromising themselves with marriages that are not very satisfying. They long to own their own boutique, but domestic priorities always seem to cut short their aspirations and their friendship. They are only happy when they are together. However, the husbands struggle with their postwar identities as well, and compromise turns them into angry men. The children, meanwhile, are the quiet victims in all of this. It's a predictable yet moving film with much to offer. --Bill Desowitz Amazon.com
 |  | Horrible parents, even worse wives |  |
I had to watch this flick in my French cinema class and about walked out it was so ridiculous. If you enjoy movies where you pretty much like everyone else other then the main characters then go see it. Basically the movie focuses on these two women that obviously are in love with each other. Throughout the movie they cheat on their husbands with other men, abandon their children like they don't matter, and more simply put revert to being teenagers with no respect for others even though they both are married with children. *SPOILER* One husband was such a great father to his children you hoped that the two women would just leave to go do their lesbian thing and never come back but no, the women decided to take the children with them and leave their husbands. Freaking ridiculous. This movie was based off of a true story of the own director's childhood and boy do I feel bad for her.
March 4, 2008We learn about two women Helene and Madeleine. We meet Helene in WWII France in the Jewish women camp about to be send off to the concentration camp. Her beauty meets the eye of a man who offers her marriage that she accepts as a means of avoiding the concentration camp. At the same time, Madeleine is an art student married to a colleague student who tragically gets killed during one of the student riots. 10 years later, in the early 1950s both women get to know each other after attending their children's school rehearsal. By now, Helene has two daughters and Madeleine has a son. Both are trapped in the marriages that can only be described as loveless arrangements of convenience. Their respective husbands see them as a possesions to have and show off to the outside world, creatures destined to stay home and tend to their children. But as the friendship between the two women develops, their frustration with their lives starts to simmer. They try to cover their dissatisfaction with love affirs, or one time encounters with the strangers, until they both come to realize how strong their mutual attraction for each other is. Both women understand each other and feel each other's emotional void they experience with their husbands. Their innate sense of style, strong desire for independence and want for meaningful existance draws them together to the frustration of both of their husbands. While movie never shows sexually explicit connection between two women their need for each other is obvious. Nothing seems to be able to stop it and social norms of the time are to be broken regardless of the consequences. Based on the life and experiences of director's mother this is a powerful story. It is also impossible to believe that Isabelle Huppert made this film 20 almost years ago. She is still equally beautiful, but I finally got to understand how she established herself as an actress portraying very emotionally complicated women.
December 7, 2007 | | Feminism in France in the Fifties | |
The best movies, like the best novels, are those that present characters in such a way that you can't help getting involved with their lives, in having a strong reaction to them. This is one of those movies and the reaction I get from it is negative: I want to shake these characters by the shoulders to get them to stop what they're doing.
Set in Lyon, France, during the 1950s, two women become very close friends (lovers actually) and want to escape from the confines of their marriages and their husbands. One is married to a selfish schemer who deals on the blackmarket; the other to a garage owner who loves nothing more than playing with his kids. The two womwn feel "trapped" and "confined" by these men, and long to be "free."
If director Kurys wants the viewer to feel sympathetic toward these two "modern" women, she's failed miserably with me: they come across as little more than selfish flakes. The men have their problems, too (insensitive, doting), but they at least appear more honest. I know feminism meant different things in different parts of the world, and this movie deals with French concerns (which are different than American or Arabic or Chinese), but it's really difficult to swallow. As a piece of movie making it is very well done - and certainly evokes very strong reactions. I wonder what the validity quotient of this movie is today, even in France.
November 13, 2005 | | A Moving and Complex Tale of Emotion ... | |
The beuty of the film lies in its subtle power to transmit the complexity of when family obligations come in the way of self-fullfilment. The film is based on the true story of the the film maker's mother and was a cathartic process for Kurys, who was very close to her father and mourned his seperation from her life. Kurys exhaults her mother's strength and independace in the face of 1950s tradition but does not entirely pardon her for splitting up the family. The narritive is also a feminist consciousness-raising exercise to the extent that it invites the spectator to share in the protagonists' growing awareness of their unsatisfactory lives as married women in the pre-feminist patriarchal world of the 1950s. And though Kurys maintains that her mother's relationship with her female remained platonic, the movie is full of shared looks and pauses that suggest a desire between the two women. the intensity of the their attraction (wether platonic or otherwise) is expressed through the small seemingly meaningless phrases that we utter when we are overrun with emotion. One may postulate that had the relationship between the two women evovled in a different time where the idea of a lesbian affair would not have been so 'unthinkable' their feelings could have bloosemed into a sexual affair.
December 3, 2003| | | The French Before the Invited the Manage a Trois. | |
This movie is frustrating because it was apparently fimed before the French invited the Menage A Trois. Here you have two guys who are total .... I ask you, if you were married to Isabelle Huppert, would you act like this [guy] in the movie? Here is what I get from this movie: Never lose your temper, never slap your wife, never yell at your wife, never complain to your wife, and, most importantly, when your wife has sex with another woman, don't get mad, just beg to watch, okay. Now, I am not a .... I get it.
May 30, 2003More reviews at Amazon.com ...
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