REVIEW - THERESE DESQUEYROUX

Claude Miller was a respected but rarely revered French director, whose films attracted frequent admiration but less frequent adulation. His adaptation of Francois Mauriac's classic novel, Therese Desqueyroux, is obviously the work of a proficient filmmaker, sensitive and learned in the simple art of storytelling. It never quite catches alight, though, a feature that many may attribute to Miller's tone, but is perhaps better attributed to Mauriac's tale, which doesn't willingly seem to lend itself to 21st Century style histrionics. Miller's reverential delicacy may hinder the film from becoming anything more than a solid, stately, artistically conservative literary adaptation, but this is bread-and-butter French filmmaking from a none-more-Gallic source, and there'll always be a place for that in cinema, I hope. Audrey Tautou can't convince as a day under 30, alas, but she's a perfect fit as Therese. In 1920s rich, rural Western Europe, Therese is a woman with 'too many thoughts', a notion which she herself admits, perhaps because she's thought so much about it. Today, her tendencies would be utterly usual, and her outlook antiquated. She comes to make a series of endlessly questionable decisions, most of which can probably be explained by the fact that she's a French woman in classic French literature. Mauriac, Miller and Tautou all appear to have the same opinion on Therese, that she's an intelligent person, neither good nor bad, who wrongs and is wronged, and it's Tautou who best communicates the depths of the quandaries in which she finds herself. She's a transfixing lead in a film without a single poor performance. Perhaps filmmakers ought to turn more often to inspiration from the past, when neatness and clarity and distinctions between good and evil, happy and sad were much less prolific in art. Delectable cinematography beautifully captures exquisite production and costume design, and a sumptuous soundtrack ties it all off with a pretty little bow.