An Oscar for best foreign film can sometimes spur directors down the road to cosmopolitanism, but for French movie-maker Regis Wargnier (Indochine) international acclaim has brought him back home. In his latest feature, Une Femme Francaise, we are treated to an operatic tale of stubbornly adulterous womanhood set against the backdrop of a post-war France. One of France's most famous off-screen couples, Emmanuelle Beart and Daniel Autueil, was enlisted to enact the drama. Beart, as an army wife, plays a mother and love machine; Autueil, an officer and a cuckold.
Wed just as war breaks out, Jeanne (Beart) hardly gets to know her dashing military husband, Louis (Autueil), before the debacle of 1940. While waiting four long years for his return from a POW camp, Jeanne, living up to all the clichés about Frenchwomen, scandalises her in-laws by her lusty embrace of other comrades-in-arms. Hoping to forget these wartime betrayals, Louis takes his wife and the infant twins he didn't father to Allied-occupied Berlin, where Jeanne eventually falls for Matthias (Gabriel Barylli), a sensitive German industrialist who follows Jeanne back to France. The marriage is left a hollow shell, the love affair is doomed to failure, and further infidelities loom on the horizon.
This film is draining, not only of Beart's well-photographed tear ducts, but of the audience's capacity for sustaining emotional assault.
Characters never shake hands in Wargnier's world - they hug, weep and hang on for dear life. As the earnest lover willing to build the new Germany, Barylli (Butterbrot, Welcome In Vienna) distances himself from the director's vision of character as a perpetual emotional whirlpool. Sure to please idolaters of Beart's well-cultivated beauty, Une Femme Francaise is a good old-fashioned melodrama. Stephen O'Shea
Prod cos: UGC Images, TF1 Films Production, DA Films, Recorded Pictures Company, Studio Babelsberg, Eurimages, British Screen, Filmforderung Berlin, Centre National de la Cinematographie, Sofinergie 2, Sofinergie 3
Prod: Yves Marmion
Dir: Regis Wargnier
Scr: Regis Wargnier, Alain Le Henry
Ph: Francois Catonne, Berto
Eds: Genevieve Winding, Agnes Schwab, Stephanie Small
Production Designer: Jacques Bufnoir, Dieter Dohl, Jean Poinot
Costumes: Jacques Fonteray, Annick Francois, Gudrun Leyendecker, Thierry Delettre Music: Patrick Doyle
Sound: Guillaume Sciama, Olivier Burgaud
Cast: Emmanuelle Beart Daniel Auteuil, Gabriel Barylli, Jean-Claude Brialy, Geneviève Casile, Michel Etcheverry
Running time: 100 minutes
Une Femme Francaise
