La Repentie
2002 Crime Drama
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Credits
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Summary
A mysterious woman, dressed in black and carrying a small suitcase, arrives in Nice and
tries in vain to get a job in luxury goods shop. She ends up in a plush hotel where
a solitary middle-aged man, engages her to be his companion. They introduce themselves
- she is Charlotte, he is Paul. Both are reluctant to talk about their past; both
need someone to make their present predicament more tolerable. Unbeknown to either
of them, Charlotte is being followed by another man, who seems intent on revenge...
Review
La Repentie sees Isabelle Adjani’s long awaited
return to the big screen after an absence of six years - her last film being Jeremiah
Chechik’s Diabolique (1996). It is hardly
the most inspiring or promising of comebacks - her performance in this unsatisfying hotchpotch
of romantic drama and noir-ish crime thriller lacks any kind of emotional quality and
serves merely to weaken what would in any case have been a mediocre, badly composed film.
The film’s director is Laetitia Masson, who earned distinction for her previous films, En avoir (ou pas) (1995) and À vendre (1998), films with a hard social realist edge and a distinctive visual style. La Repentie is her fourth film and lacks the cohesion and impact of her previous work; it feels more like Masson is experimenting with cinematic form, rather than attempting to create a polished piece of cinema. The film’s two stars - Isabelle Adjani and Sami Frey - worked together previously in Claude Miller’s 1983 thriller Mortelle randonnée, and the former seems hardly to have aged by one day. Although they work together well - the best moments in La Repentie are where they are having intimate exchanges of dialogue - neither seems to be able to invest the film with much in the way of emotion or charm. This is perhaps what is most frustrating about this film - it is hard for a spectator to be engaged when the two lead actors look as if they are only doing it for the money. Any appeal that La Repentie may have had is pretty much eroded by some really annoying artistic indulgences. The part that most merits the scissors treatment is the boring as Hell sequence near the start of the film where Adjani dances for what seems like an eternity on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. This is one of many occasions in the film where a popular music track is inserted and played at maximum volume - not only do the choices of music seem inappropriate, but in virtually every case the narrative flow is torpedoed for apparently no good reason. The result can hardly be described as a comfortable cinematic experience. © James Travers 2006 Write a review for this film... |
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