Gabrielle

Directed by Patrice Chéreau

Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle offers genuine excitement. Not just another movie—it’s an experiment in how movies depict relationships and emotion, testing the means by which movies become art. Chéreau adapts Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Return,” which outlines the final disintegration of a Belle Epoque-era marriage when an egotistical husband (Pascal Greggory) realizes that his prodigal wife, Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert), doesn’t really need him. Chéreau’s narrative takes a firmly feminist bent, similar to the gay empathy of his previous films (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, Son Frère). He is the most philosophically and aesthetically inquiring contemporary gay filmmaker, but doesn’t always penetrate the confusion of loving, lustful people (as his captivating but off-course Intimacy proved). 

Gabrielle succeeds because it is a formalistic tour de force. Chéreau recreates an era using both color and black-and-white film, theatrical artifice combined with photographic realism and verbal graphics in stupefyingly huge fonts. Gabrielle goes at marriage not for topical political controversy, but as the primal obsession of artists who first called themselves “modern.” (Chéreau specifically invokes a period of theater, painting, photography and literature.) Cinematographer Eric Gautier’s widescreen compositions seem to reinvent how painting became cinema (as Griffith and Gance did), and he revitalizes the way we look at “issues” as a way of examining character. 

Measuring art by the intricacies of the cultural past is a more enlightened approach than the specious historicism of movies like The Notorious Bettie Page and Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Three Times. Chereau fixes Gabrielle’s victory in the realism of Greggory’s lewd arrogance and Huppert’s sneaky strength. Internalizing husband and wife tension, their litmus complexions give texture to shame and anger. Gabrielle’s experiment triumphs.