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Gabrielle

Yells "Art!" a little too loudly

By A.S. HAMRAH | June 30, 2006

2.5 Stars

Huppert and Greggory in Gabrielle.

Based on a Joseph Conrad story called “The Return” and set in Belle Époque Paris, Patrice Chéreau's bizarre, lugubrious movie is an undistinguished opener for a superb French Film Festival. It’s haunted by the ghosts of early modernism, who follow an unglued husband and wife (Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert) down corridors as Chéreau tries to make us forget Merchant Ivory ever existed. Gabrielle starts out in black-and-white, with Greggory leaving a train station and arriving home to find a letter from his wife. In the first third, a souped-up Visconti-ism (in color) competes with Wellesian moodiness, as if the missing footage of The Magnificent Ambersons had been replaced with extra scenes from Il gattopardo|The Leopard. After that, Huppert's pressurized performance dominates and operatic devastation prevails — operatic in the way one feels the presence of the camera operators. When the film climaxes, Chéreau supertitles dialogue over silent images in a postmodern ploy that yells, “Art!”

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Topics: Reviews , Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Conrad

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Watch the trailer for Gabrielle (QuickTime)

ARTICLES BY A.S. HAMRAH

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