Gabrielle

The most theatrical of all Chéreau’s films is a work based on the short story by Joseph Conrad "The Return”, published in 1898 in the collection Tales of Unrest; the novelist himself was clear in his opinion of his novella – he hated it. Perhaps this is the reason why he shared this sentiment with the hero of his story, an affluently self-assured and emotionally hypocritical man, whose world has just collapsed. Chéreau moved Conrad’s harrowing and cruelly melancholic study of the breakdown of a marriage to a period shortly before the 1st World War, which threatened to completely destroy the solid foundations of decoratively elegant, formalised society. Unlike the literary model, the film’s viewing angle has shifted, thus the relationship, originally seen only from the man’s perspective, acquires the balance of shared agony. Jean’s proprietarily complacent arrogance receives an unexpected blow one day when, arriving home from work, he finds a letter in which his wife informs him that she is leaving him to be with her lover. This is the woman, the pride of his "collection”, its most valuable article, whose every thought and dream he was sure he knew. However, before the shock has time to subside, Gabrielle returns... Weary of her own yearning for love and her fear of it, she now confronts her husband who, swept up in a vortex of unexpected, new-found emotion, tries to achieve equilibrium and resolution. The director enhances the astringent luxury (Césars for costume and production design) of his family microworld using a combination of black-and-white and colour film, suggestive dusky lighting and cinematic devices typical for the period; his chief instruments in this brutal, emotive vivisection are, of course, the lead players, Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert.