Beautiful, photogenic French coastlines and mountains can only do so much to fill the space usually reserved for engaging storytelling. In the case of Nicole Garcia‘s latest, the disastrously slow and insufferable “From The Land Of The Moon” (called “Mal De Pierres” in French), your time would be better spent staring at a postcard for two hours. No, not even the presence of the usually magnetic Marion Cotillard will stave off the boredom of Garcia and Jacques Fieschi‘s screenplay. Based on a novel by Italian author Milena Agus, the story of a mentally fragile woman who inexplicably suffers from the throes of the idea of love — rarely from love itself — is so heavily steeped in old-age traditional values of marriage and gender roles that you could almost call it courageous for being a 2016 film and dealing so directly with a subject that’s anathema to the current surge of progressiveness. I say “almost” because ‘Land Of The Moon’ instead lives up to its cheese-grated English title and delivers a tale of ridiculous romance that would have Danielle Steel rolling her eyes.
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What’s really frustrating is that the film’s opening sequence is so full of promise. José (Alex Brendemühl) and his wife Gabrielle (Cotillard) are taking their son, Marc (Victor Quilichini), to Lyon for a piano competition. When Gabrielle spots the name of a street by chance, she gets distraught and panicked and demands the driver stop the car. Flustered, she rushes over to an apartment building and traces her finger over a name by the buzzer code — Sauvage. Then the camera slowly zooms into Cotillard’s eyes as they well up with tears before diving into a flashback to what (we hope) is a riveting story full of intrigue and secrets. Instead, we find out that Gabrielle is the oldest daughter of humble French villagers, proclaimed mad by her community because of her tendency for fits, cramps, and histrionics, when in fact all she wants in life is to find what she calls “the principle thing” — to experience unconditional love. Her mother instead chooses José as her husband — a Spanish farmer who has relocated to France after his hometown was destroyed in WWII — because, whatever her problem is, “she needs a man.”
Gabrielle makes her total disaffection for José clear from the start, but succumbs to the marriage anyway. After an out-of-the-blue miscarriage, she is diagnosed with stone disease and taken to a spa center for therapeutic treatment. There, she meets André Sauvage (Louis Garrel), a wounded soldier from the war who is so quiet and introverted that he has practically zero personality. How she falls so deeply and instantly in love with him actually ends up being the film’s greatest mystery. In any case, her sudden love for André rekindles the “passion” she has “burning” inside her.
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Marion Cotillard is in almost every frame here, but it’s Brendemühl’s melancholic performance as the soft-spoken and gold-natured José that ends up being the only bearable thing in the film. That in itself is a testament to the film’s complete lack of vigor (and that’s not to belittle Brendemühl’s talent, which is obvious and immense, but to point out how furiously uninteresting Gabrielle is as a character, person, woman, wife, and lover). Meanwhile, Garrel is such a blank slate that his André even faints while playing the piano — the character’s one true defining feature beside being a sad soldier who doesn’t agree with his father. The conversations that drag on between Gabrielle and André at the spa (the stuff that’s meant to contain the film’s very essence) are so airy, graceless, and tedious that they turn a two-hour film into one that feels like a four-hour drudge. And with a screenplay so replete with nonsensical dialogue — “Every time you come, it rains” as one silly example out of too many — practically everything else falls apart around it, including our interest.
One can see why “From The Land Of The Moon” worked as a novel, since most of the ebbs and flows of the conflict are internalized by Gabrielle. With a dog’s breakfast for a screenplay, though, not even the wonderful Marion Cotillard can make this woman’s stilted story appetizing on screen. And with that, all of the backwardness that’s found in 1950s village mentality feels even more out-of-place and bothersome. Anything that could possibly relate to modern mindsets is either off-screen or in a character’s head, turning this into a film that only quacks who still believe Female Hysteria is a medical condition would enjoy. And I haven’t even discussed the film’s major plot twist, but suffice it to say that it’s preposterous to the point of being unintentionally laughable. Despite Garcia’s great intentions of making us understand and emotionally connect with a fragile soul, she ends up paving the road to a hellishly insufferable film. [D-]
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