REVIEW - BEFORE THE WINTER CHILL (PHILIPPE CLAUDEL)

There's nothing discreet nor charming about Philippe Claudel's bourgeoisie, these chronically self-conscious yet so non-self-aware people. Claudel's immersion in their phony culture is so absolute, he's utterly incapable of identifying their class as a feature of their character - it's taken as moot, left without comment or even acknowledgement. He even taints his spare few supporting characters with the same middle-class attributes, positing that the impoverished too are eloquent, polite, soul-searching art lovers. Late in Before the Winter Chill, we are introduced to the experience of life for someone who doesn't have a lavish modern abode and the income to support a holiday to the Caribbean when relieved of their employment for six months; by this stage, though, the stiff, chilly atmosphere that Claudel has constructed around his dreary, inconceivably obvious plot has sapped away all emotion from his scenarios, and we could hardly care. This moment could have been the film's epiphany. From here, Claudel descends into crude, exploitative melodrama, the sort which would have been unbearable for two hours but which confirms the presence of the strain of camp in Before the Winter Chill that he's been cultivating almost since its opening shot. He's playing silly games with us by now, using soap opera tactics to elicit emotional responses that he has not earned, but at least he's getting somewhere with them. There's a sensation that a sequel could be so much more engaging than this tired, trite, sexist nonsense, and I take a strange enjoyment out of that sort of cliffhanger ending, just as things start picking up, just as Kristin Scott Thomas' glower threatens to spill over. She's suited to a better film, but to a role like this - Scott Thomas knows how to command a room simply by being in it. She's wholly self-conscious, and also wholly self-aware, and she seems to understand the culture of the contemporary bourgeois better than her director. And she's English!