So we don’t want to live like that. Watched this chamber French drama in the original in an empty hall of a small Geneva cinema. Incredibly dreary, monotonous and depressing art house, after it even live somehow disgusting. Maupassant, of course, was also not a bedtime story, but in the film everything is completely hopeless: focusing only on the bad moments in the life of the heroine, savoring all her humiliations and failures. Just a couple of minutes is devoted to the happy time of ignorance and youth, spent at the window open in the garden, and then - dense black darkness.
Large, endless plans against the background of rough silence, which you look with a feeling of awkwardness, as if secretly peeping through a keyhole: Jeanne walks by the sea, Jeanne eats, Jeanne painfully experiences the first wedding night, Jeanne coughs long and juicy, Jeanne suffers, Jeanne suffers, Jeanne suffers. There are women born to suffer from everything. Life feels this and dumps more problems and betrayals on them, then from parents, then from her husband, then from friends and children. And without it, they would be bored, I think.
If you do not know that the film was released quite recently, you can think that it was shot in the eighties: filmed very old-fashioned, almost without musical accompaniment and even the actors look like real representatives of the 19th century. Very tired monotonous flashbacks, where the heroine usually runs around the field with someone and laughs, as usual show happiness, which was, but gone, in music videos, as if there are no other ways. To age the main character by the way almost did not work: during the narration she had to gain 25 years, and only the colors of dresses and the intensity of black shadows on the eyelids changed. At first, the actress seemed slightly autistic, and then deeply hysterical, lacking emotional balance.
When the picture finally came to an end and Rosalie, to the accompaniment of the already tired silence, uttered her sacred phrase, which so hooked Tolstoy, very much not loved by me, that life “is not so good, and not so bad as it seems,” and the screen finally plunged into black, I still sighed with relief. Too black and lifeless film adaptation turned out. You don’t wish that kind of “life” on anyone.