I've Loved You So Long

If we were French, we would find Jerry Lewis funny. If we were French, we would know how to wear a scarf, and our lips would exist in a perpetually pursed state, always ready to say things like “Tu as bu mon vin cru.” (You have drunk my wine.) If we were French, we would, I hope, be pleased that Kristin Scott Thomas is able to speak our language without the perverse pronunciation of her British countrymen. As Frenchmen and women, we would immediately understand the meaning of the title of I’ve Loved You So Long, the superb and moving film, starring longtime French resident Thomas, that many say should have been this year’s Oscar selection from France. (released on DVD on March 3)

French schoolchildren know the song “Á la Claire Fontaine” from which Philippe Claudel’s movie takes its title (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime). Hundreds of years ago, the song was the nostalgic anthem of French settlers in Quebec and then the favorite of the Voyageurs who paddled their canoes to its rhythm. The verses of the song tell a fairly typical (for a folk song) story of a respite by a fountain, a lingering sadness, and a lost love. But the refrain seems to exist in another register altogether, expressing a profound and universal sentiment of love and longing. In its entirety, the refrain translates roughly to: I’ve loved you for a very long time. I will never forget you.

It’s this longing and commitment tinged with nostalgia that serves as the undercurrent of Claudel’s film. I’ve Loved You So Long tells the story of Juliette Fontaine (Thomas), released from fifteen years in prison to the home of her younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein). There she takes up an uneasy place among Léa’s two young daughters, her husband, and her father-in-law who is mute since suffering a stroke. The film reveals its several mysteries, large and small, little by little—partly through halting conversations between the two sisters, but largely through the extraordinarily subtle changes in Thomas’ expressions as she makes her way in this new world. This fall in Chekhov’s The Seagull, Thomas pitched her emotions perfectly for the New York stage (I attended the Oct. 21 performance). A maximalist where it was necessary for the manipulative Arkadina, here, she is a minimalist, registering every slight shift in Juliette’s emotions with minute clarity.

Life in the university town of Nancy is joyous and warm—Léa’s mute father-in-law provides some quiet comedy as he exchanges post-it notes with his granddaughters—but is never free from an undercurrent of pain. Claudel doesn’t shy away from this sadness, nor does he make it melodramatic. Watching the American trailer for the film, you might get the sense that it is a thriller almost on a par with the 1992 movie Damage. This is, suffice it to say, not the case.



In fact, much of the film has to do with things that are never shown or that can’t be shown at all: memories—suppressed, cherished, newly-formed. At times, memory ties the two sisters together, but as often, it keeps them apart, as when Léa is dismayed to find she has no memory of Juliette’s bringing her to weekly dance lessons. One woman’s nostalgia is the other woman’s painful longing. And this is where the song comes in. For what the sisters both remember is playing the piano together—specifically, playing "Á la Claire Fontaine," a favorite for its echo of their family name. As they make their tentative approaches towards each other—and towards the events that put Juliette in prison—the song weaves through their lives, providing the leitmotif for that Gallic mixture of love and pain.

I’ve Loved You So Long is quite clearly a French film. As my teenager daughter put it, “They’re not doing anything.” And this is true: Claudel lets the camera rest on Thomas’ face, or on Zylberstein’s, for long shots during which they do nothing but think and remember. Complaint notwithstanding, my daughter did not leave the room. Either she had nothing better to do, or she could see that Claudel’s approach was paying off. He wisely trusts his actors to communicate the story without saying a word. (Another French element? An American movie would have shown us scenes of Léa taking Juliette shopping for new clothes. Claudel skips these scenes. His register of Juliette’s thawing is sex with a stranger.)

I’ve Loved You So Long isn’t the only recent film to use "Á la Claire Fontaine" as a theme. The excellent and overlooked The Painted Veil uses the song to surprisingly powerful effect. In a remote Chinese town, French nuns have taught the song in the orphanage they run. Kitty Fane, played by Naomi Watts, accompanies them on the piano. She is English, so it’s not her song; it’s not the children’s song either. But they share its lonesome refrain as a melody for their displacement and dislocation from the people and the places that they love.

It’s sad to think of those first French arrivals in the new world, singing about what they loved and would never forget, even as their memories of the France they had left behind must have grown dimmer and dimmer. At the end of the day, that’s exactly what Claudel’s film is about: our attempts to hold onto people as our connections to them grow frayed and thin.

Tilda Swinton: The One (or Two) and Only

Nobody looks like Tilda Swinton—besides, maybe David Bowie, who shares her androgynous, fashion-forward persona. She was the best thing in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and is generally the best thing in any movie she appears in. As part of the star chamber that awarded the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Penelope Cruz, Swinton did not disappoint. Her outfit was puzzling and unusual, and her handling of the whole thing seemed to say: Right, let’s just let Tilda keep the statuette, shall we?

Seeing her in the Oscars telecast reminded me of what might be the quintessential Swinton role, that of Orlando, in Sally Potter’s eponymous 1992 film. Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando spans four hundred years as it tells the story of a young man born into wealth in Renaissance England. Yes, that was four hundred years, and yes, Swinton plays a man. But, if you’re keeping track, sometime around 1700, Orlando turns into a woman.


Potter’s casting of Swinton is an inspired choice. No one else could possibly have played the role (except, again, David Bowie--but Bowie’s acting chops are a bit below Swinton’s level). Even though Potter’s film is far from naturalistic—Swinton’s performance includes a handful of moments when she twitches her head imperceptibly towards the camera and delivers a one-line commentary on the action—Swinton deserves enormous credit for so thoroughly seeming to inhabit the skin of both a male and a female character. When Orlando is a young man, Swinton’s walk and movements—even the way she holds her head—are somehow clearly male. When Orlando is a woman, everything changes, softening, becoming somehow fuller. Swinton doesn’t simply reproduce stereotypes; this is the same individual rendered in two genders.


Potter plays around with gender—as she must, if she is to adapt Woolf’s novel for film—through the film. Quentin Crisp is creepily good as a long-haired Queen Elizabeth. Later, during the nineteenth-century portion of the story, Potter tweaks the Victorian trope of the injured female to be rescued by the man. She anticipates Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility by three years, as Orlando rescues Shelmerdine (easily the strangest name in all of literature) from his broken ankle. Billy Zane’s hair is almost as long as Kate Winslet’s Marianne’s.



But see for yourself. And read Woolf’s odd 1928 book. Though I first read Orlando more than twenty-five years ago, Woolf’s description of the Little Ice Age that allowed for festivals on the Thames during the Renaissance has remained vivid in my memory. Potter does a nice job recreating the scenes on film, though Woolf’s evocation wins the competition.

Orlando is indeed a writer’s movie. Orlando’s final incarnation is as a single woman, a single mother, and a writer. Taking the manuscript of her life’s story into the steel-and-glass office of a publisher, she runs into the characteristic writer’s experience: rejection. As the editor puts it:

“It’s very, very good. Written from the heart. I think it’ll sell. Provided you rewrite it. You know: increase the love interest, give it a happy ending. By the way, how long did this draft take you?”

Orlando’s reaction? Another one of those glances at the camera. The next shot shows her kick-starting her motorcycle and driving away with her child. Revision be damned!

Slumdog Millionaire: Worth the Wait

If I didn’t know the box-office numbers, I’d think I was the last person in America to have seen Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's multi-Oscar-winning movie. Judging by the size of the crowd at a Saturday afternoon showing outside Boston, I guess there were a fair number of us who waited until after the Academy Awards. I don’t know about all those other people, but I for one had been wary of the movie’s relentless hype until the goodwill became too much for me to ignore. All those happy people in their seats—but mostly at the podium—at the Oscars, and all those people who voted for the film and cheered for its success: so many people can’t be wrong, can they?

Well, they can, but not in the case of this movie. There are many reasons to like Slumdog Millionaire, and to have chosen it the best picture among the Oscar nominees—and some of these reasons even have to do with what is actually on the screen. First, the camerawork: it is sure of itself and it has something to say, and that is a combination that we don’t always find in a movie. In some films, we get a camera that is more full of itself than sure, moving around in artsy ways that have no relation to the content on screen. In others, we get a camera that just doesn’t do much of anything at all. It’s as if no one was actually making the film—and I’m not talking about auteurs who are trying to make a statement about unmediated reality. Slumdog Millionaire gets it right.

Anthony Dod Mantle uses quick cuts and tilted angles, emphasizing at one moment the angular geometry of a world (trains, empty skyscrapers, and highway underpasses) that doesn’t bother to accommodate the people in it, and at another the jumbled and cramped spaces that have been fashioned by the people themselves, as they pile shack upon shack to create their homes amid the squalor of Mumbai. But his talents don’t stop there. To set a different mood, he gives us an extended sequence of the young brothers Jamal and Salim aboard (but more accurately atop) trains after they escape from a Fagin-like impresario of beggars. I’ve seen that whole Guy on a Train thing many times before (even in Get Smart), but nothing beats the wide-angle shots of two tiny figures on the train’s roof as it crosses the Indian countryside.

Actually, something does: the very first chase scene, in which the two brothers and a crowd of other children are chased away from an airport-runway cricket game. There is something about the way that Mantle films the two children in motion, interrupting an action-film style of cuts with overhead or wide-angle shots, that sets the boys as insignificant in the larger context while at the same time intensely connecting us to them as individuals. I would argue that it is the most moving set of images in the film.

There are other reasons people like the movie, though, and they have very little to do with what is on screen. First of all, we love underdog stories. And this is an upbeat version of the classic type. Jamal Malik is the underdog who has picked up enough intelligence and information along the way to make himself a success in a world he is not a part of. He’s not unlike the character played by Isla Fisher in Confessions of A Shopaholic, or by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. These are all outsiders whose unconventional route to insight and information allow them to win over the hearts and minds of the people in power.

Jamal’s underdog run at the big prize mimics the brilliant career of the film itself. Doyle shows us crowds gathered in Mumbai, outside the Taj Mahal, in the slums, cheering Jamal on as he faces his final question. Substitute the Oscars broadcast with the movie’s game show and you have the same scenes: people gathered around television screens, hoping for the success of the Indian underdog. (And who doesn’t want to like India these days? Even before the terrorist attacks, it had become our favorite developing country.) You could say that Boyle’s movie contains the instructions for its own viewing: Love the Underdog.

At the end of the day, does it matter whether the appeal of Slumdog Millionaire comes from the movie itself or from the circumstances of its viewing? On an intellectual level, the answer must be yes. Years from now, when people aren’t awash in the goodwill generated by this particular Oscar season, the movie will have to stand on its own. The thing is, it does. When the movie ended, I was momentarily surprised to find myself in a cinema on a brisk New England evening. Thanks to Danny Boyle, I had been very far away indeed.