Three of the four films made in the last 11 years by Emmanuelle Bercot have Catherine Deneuve as the star. Bercot is one of those film directors who, being also an actress, knows very well how to highlight the actors who play in her films. I think that they appreciate and enjoy the freedom of expression and the collaboration with a filmmaker who understands their experiences and feelings well. ‘Elle s’en va‘, the first film that brought the two together in 2013 (the title in the English distribution is ‘On My Way‘) is a good proof of the advantages of such collaborations. Catherine Deneuve creates one of her good and consistent roles, and for Bercot this is one of the most successful films of her entire career as a director.
The opening scenes describe one of the most catastrophic days in the life of Bettie, the main heroine of the film. She is in her 60s and lives a secluded life, running together with her mother a family restaurant that is in danger of bankruptcy. The most important memory of her life is participating in a Miss France beauty contest that had taken place some 40 years ago. The sweetheart of her youth is dead, so is the husband she may or may not have loved, and she is just now finding out that her lover has left her for a much younger woman. Nervous, she starts smoking again and gets into the car, driving where the roads take her. Her journey gets on a purpose when her daughter calls asking her to take her 11-year-old grandson to his other grandfather, whom she has never met. Traveling by car from one end of France to the other helps her get to know a world from which she had been cut off, her grandson and ultimately herself.
In ‘Elle s’en va‘ we see two films. One of them is a ‘road movie’ set in ‘Deep France’ seen from the perspective of a woman who chose (or fate chose for her) to spend four decades in an isolated corner of the country. The other is a family drama spanning four generations. I really liked the ‘road movie’ part. Wanting to distance herself from the American or German models of the genre, Emmanuelle Bercot presents a diverse and positive human perspective and landscape. With one exception, Bettie meets good people, even if some are strange, people who jump in to help her rather than rob her, and at no point does she feel threatened as a single woman traveling alone. It is perhaps also a reflection of the other drama he is experiencing, the personal one. Viewers will never find out if her isolation was voluntary, if her relationships failed more because of her own fault or not. Some interesting themes are rather sketched out than developed, such as the repeated failure of women in every generation of the family to live independently, away from or without the men they loved. The scenes of the reunion after many decades of the participants in beauty contests of the last century would deserve a separate film. The ending is far too conventional to be believable. Catherine Deneuve is, of course, amazing. Not only does she seamlessly play the part of a woman ten years her junior, but she does so with sensitivity and depth, filling the screen with beauty and personality, just as she did 50 years before and will do 10 years from later. The role is written for her, the camera follows her from far and near, and the actress enters the role and imposes her persona and personality on her. Here, however, is the problem and perhaps the weakness of the film: Deneuve is so dominant that everything that happens around her character is overshadowed. It is as if we are in the central square of a city in the middle of which a superb statue or fountain absorbs the eyes of the visitors and does not allow them to see the beauty of the surrounding houses.