Nicole Garcias is one of the French directors who excels at bringing female and feminist themes to the attention of viewers, while offering the opportunity for consistent leading roles to the actresses who appear in her films. In fact, she is a prolific and talented actress herself. ‘Mal de pierres‘, her 2016 film, proposes such a character and the performance is entrusted to Marion Cotillard, an actress who has not disappointed me in any of the films I have seen her in the last 10-15 years. The book is an adaptation of a novel by the Italian writer Milena Agus, the title being in fact the name used in the middle of the last century for the painful condition that causes kidney stones. In English, by the way, the name sounds even more poetic – ‘From the Land of the Moon‘, a quote from the novel to characterize the behavior of the heroine, providing one of the keys to understanding this film.
What disease does the heroine of the film suffer from? The film begins with a scene that triggers a feedback two decades back, when Gabrielle, the daughter of wealthy farmers in the last grade of high school, falls in love with her literature teacher. Her life seems to be influenced by readings from novels by Emily Brontë and Flaubert, and when her advances are rejected by her teacher (who is married, by the way), her reaction is violent. Is it a mental illness, or a reaction to the stifling environment in the still rather puritanical atmosphere of 1950s France, a few years before political, cultural and sexual revolutions broke out? The forced marriage to Jose, a poor but hard-working and enterprising Catalan imigrant, is imposed on her as an alternative to being admitted to a mental institution. The marriage is unhappy, Jose loves her, but Gabrielle tells him from the start that she will never love him. Arrived at a sanatorium to treat her kidney disease, Gabrielle meets Andre, a severely wounded officer, physically hurt and morally traumatised in the Indochina War. The love story between the two gives the woman an opportunity to recover, maybe even to reach moments of happiness, but it has no chance of ending well.
I won’t tell too much about what follows, because the story includes an unexpected turn, which completely changes the viewers’ perspective on what they saw on screen. I will only say that the role of Jose played by Alex Brendemühl, an actor with over 100 roles in movies, but about whom I did not know about until now, is much more interesting and consistent than it seems at first glance and that the Catalan actor does a fine job. Marion Cotillard deserves all praises she received for her performance in this film, she is one of the leading actresses in France today, and this complex and interesting role fits her perfectly. Louis Garrel, on the other hand, gets too thin a role – that of the wounded officer Gabrielle falls in love with in the rest house – and fails to be more than an adequate physical presence. It is worth mentioning the excellent cinematogrphy of Christophe Beaucarne, with a special sense of integrating story and characters in nature (the countryside where the story begins, the mountains surrounding the sanatorium, the sea at the shore where Jose builds the house where he hopes to win Gabriella’s affection) .
The key to this movie is in my opinion that fact the main character appears in all the scenes, including the flashback scenes. There is no off-screen voice (thanks!), But there is no need either. It is a narrative exposed from the point of view of the woman, of what she sees or what she believe to see, of what she feels in spite of the judgments of those around her. Gabrielle is a woman who claims her right to love at a time and in a place where such aspirations were repressed and severely judged by society. However, love can be found sometimes where we least expect it. Very close to us.