Mal de pierres (2016) Reviews

• A dreamer's dream

  ferguson-62017-07-27

  Greetings again from the darkness. Director Nicole Garcia (The Adversary, 2002) takes the best-selling novel from Milena Agus and hearkens back to good old-fashioned movie melodrama – with a French twist. Of course, most any project is elevated with the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard in the lead role. Few can suffer on screen as expertly as Ms. Cotillard, and she conveys that disquiet through most of this story. What is love? You'd best not look to Gabrielle (Cotillard) for clarification. As a young woman, her search for love and sexual fulfillment follows the fantasies of the novels she reads (Wuthering Heights). Her corresponding inappropriate behavior teeters between delusion and hysteria. It's the 1950's in rural France, so her actions and attitude are not much appreciated, and her parents bribe Jose (Alex Brendemuhl), a local bricklayer, to marry Gabrielle. She is then given the choice of (an "arranged") marriage or a mental institution. As a romantic dreamer whose blurred reality expects love to mirror those romance novels, Gabrielle's self-centeredness and failure to grasp reality results in a loveless marriage – and easily one of the most uncomfortable lovemaking scenes in the history of French cinema. Beyond that, severe kidney stones make it impossible for her to bear children. In hopes of "the cure", she is sent for treatment to a spa in the Alps (it's the same spa from Paolo Sorrentino's 2015 film YOUTH). While at the spa, she meets handsome Andre (Louis Garrel), a gravely ill soldier from the Indochina War. Gabrielle imagines Andre to be everything she dreamt a lover should be (except for that whole sickness thing). The contrast between the two love-making sessions is startling, and it seems as though Gabrielle has found her bliss. The years pass after her release from the spa, and Gabrielle makes one mistake after another … blind to what and who is right in front of her … while holding on to the dreamer's dream. She is certainly not a likable person, and is downright cruel to her loyal (and extremely quiet) husband Jose. However, Ms. Cotillard is such an accomplished actress that we somehow pull for Gabrielle to "snap out of it". The novel was adapted by Jacques Fieschi, Natalie Carter and director Garcia, and you'll likely either be a fan or not, depending on your taste for old-fashioned melodrama. Despite numerous awkward moments, it's beautifully photographed by cinematographer Christophe Beaucame. Additionally, the music plays a vital role here – both composer Daniel Pemberton's use of the violin, and the duality of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto that connects Gabrielle's two worlds. You may say she's a dreamer, but I hope she's the only one.

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• Has a message that is fit for all times .

  johnhempel2018-06-18

  In life many times the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence . Both stars in this film are excellent and perfectly cast . Is the glass half empty or half full ? Sometimes it takes a shock to see that your glass is full and has been all the time . This is a beautiful movie and a" must see" for Marion Cotillard fans . It also could double for a marriage counceling film !!!!!!! True love is hard to find and sometimes harder to see .

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• It is a beautiful movie!

  Lalpera2017-05-04

  Its hard to start where. I mean the movie is like an eternally flowing river. So you simply don't know where it started or ends. Just like Gabrielle's life, feelings, emotions, love....oh the list is long. Marion is fantastic! She is the live wire of the movie. She takes you wherever she wants to go, along with her journey. Her intensity, stature, fervor has always been her identity or trademark in any movie she acts in. Jose is equally good with his supposedly subdued character. But his silence, that mostly lives in, reflected through his razor sharp eyes hangs on your head like a dagger. I am not too sure of Lt. Andre's character. As to me, was the weakest cast in the movie. True, with his illness there was nothing much he could do in the role, but his imposed vampire like look didn't help much either, to build whatever left to be build. Daniel Pemberton's Music was awesome and soothing. Use of violin in an alluring pitch in many intense scenes was spellbinding. Chris captures gorgeous landscapes and close-ups. Nicole has done a fantastic job bunching up all these talents together. Simply Fantastic! I will live a long time mesmerizing on this beautifully crafted movie. Excellent! This movie deserves a generous 9/10!

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• Love Hurts!

  random_jim2018-06-17

  I absolutely loved this film, French films are masters at this type of art. The longing for love the unknown forbidden fruit. Not wanting it yet finding it out of the blue, again metaphorical substances, her pain is real, the stone in her body is real, not attention seeking as her mother would say. Just as painful as her yearning for love, to be loved, to give love, naive, curious... The parents strict in many ways we do not know as to what she went through as a young child, but it forms and shapes her womanhood. Her mind in turmoil, visions, fantasies that are alive as daylight. Twists and turns in the film that left me totally glued as to what is going on with this creature, this beauty, these consequences that are occurring all the time, her loveless marriage, her son... It's the passion of love, lasting a mere moment in a lifetime, and ending so abruptly. To reconcile with herself, in the end finding who she is, finding her inner peace...she is in reality a part of most of mankind.

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• Mad dreamer settles into prosaic but true affection.

  maurice_yacowar2017-07-17

  Correct me if I'm wrong. This could be the first major film in which a grand passion starts with kidney stones. (Full disclosure: None of my three episodes went that way — but then none were spent at a posh French rural spa. Mind, one was in Paris.) The original French title is more revealing: The Sickness of the Stone. The film is about the affliction of stoniness — but that of the heart (turn left at the kidney). The central characters suffer from different forms of this inability to feel and to express true emotion. The central case is Gabrielle, who didn't learn emotions or their expression from her cold, practical mother. But her dull rural life nourished a rich hunger for fantasy, especially of the romantic persuasion. So powerful is her imaginative drive that it prevents her development of a real-life love. The English title — From the Land of the Moon — refers to her preference of her dream-world over reality in human connection. She is a moony dreamer, a "lunatic" in that original sense. Her first case is her schoolgirl crush on her literature tutor. She's so in love with the idea of being in love that — with no encouragement — she imagines a full-blown passion with that happily married older man. Her madness scares her mother into marrying her off to a Spanish bricklayer Jose. Gabrielle vows never to love him. He doesn't love her at the start of their marriage. Whether out of curiosity or good housekeeping, she eventually agrees to give him sex for what he would pay the prostitute. Then the kidney stones kick in. What begins as periodic cramps eventually causes a miscarriage. At Jose's insistence she retreats for treatment to a lavish country spa. There she continues her compulsive isolation — save her connection to a serving girl — until she meets and falls for Andre Sauvage. He lost a kidney in the Indochina war and suffers pained and drugged in his room alone. As his surname suggests, their eruptive passion does an end-around on the niceties of civilization and the sacrament of marriage. Or does it? A key scene in Gabrielle's imagined life plays out so persuasive that Jose's eventual revelation brings her — and us — thudding back to reality. Her men provide a key contrast in the theme of stoniness. Dream-man Andre (quite literally, at that) comes across as a man off intense emotion. But the wear has paralyzed him emotionally, rendering him unable to respond to the woman he might have loved "in another lifetime." In the spa for his missing kidney, Andre is another victim of emotional stoniness. From his experience in the Spanish civil war Jose suffered deracination, not as serious as the renal ruin but significant. It leaves him silent, withdrawn, private. His inexpressiveness seems healthy compared to his wife's florid fantasy. Unlike Andre, he can fully respond to Gabrielle, coming to love her through their shared life and even her suffering. He shows gallantry when he first walks away from her initial rejection. When he learns of her love for Andre, he respects her enough to allow her illusion to sustain her. Jose's reticent manner may suggest a coldness but he's the healthiest character in the film. He is a man of feeling not flash. Thanks to his practical engagement with the world and his growing emotional commitment, he ultimately gives Gabrielle the chance to find fulfilment here on earth. The last shot has them looking down on his village, his house, emphasizing her shift away from the moon. Indeed, Jose's character promises to sustain that marriage even better than the simpler, apparently happy marriage of Gabrielle's sister, who threatens to leave her husband's abandonment.

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