Les Âmes grises (2005)
Directed by Yves Angelo

Film Review

A darkly melancholic and brooding work, Les Âmes grises isn't so much a murder mystery as a troubling meditation on how people are affected by evil circumstances in the world around them.  Against the bloody tapestry of the First World War, the film focuses on a small group of people living on the periphery of the conflict, showing how the war has poisoned their lives, bleaching the colour out of their souls.  It is a thoughtful and understated film. based on the critically acclaimed novel of the same name by the writer Philippe Claudel, who worked closely with director Yves Angelo on the screenplay.

Yves Angelo is perhaps far better known as a cinematographer than a film director, although he has made some notable directorial contributions to French cinema, for example his 1994 film Le Colonel Chabert.  Angelo's background as a photographer shows through all of his films, which have a strong visual sense that is richly evocative of the location and themes of the story.  Les Âmes grises is a work imbued with a bleak poetry that crisply evokes the sodden gloominess of the latter years of World War I, conveying a sense of the never ending purgatory of accumulating guilt, loss and hardship.

Les Âmes grises has been criticised for its leaden mood and its lethargic pace, but these seem entirely appropriate for a film which is fundamentally about characters who are forced to look inwards for answers which the world around them fails to provide.  The film's impact stems in part from its haunting photography but mainly from some arresting introspective performances, particularly from Jean-Pierre Marielle and Denis Podalydès.  Equally impressive is Jacques Villeret, cast as the film's most interesting character, a complex villainous judge who ruthlessly exploits situations to his own advantage.  Sadly, this was to be one of Villeret's last screen roles - he died whilst the film was in post-production.

Film Synopsis

France, 1917.   A young schoolteacher, Lysia Verhaeren, arrives in a small town near to the Western Front to take up her first post at an infant's school.  The town's prosecutor, Destinat, provides a room for her in the grounds of his château and begins to take an interest in her.  Secretly, Destinat reads the letters that Lysia receives from her fiancé, a soldier who is stationed in the trenches nearby.  One day, the letters stop and Lysia soon learns that her fiancé has died in action.  Not long afterwards, the young woman is found dead in her room.  No one questions that Lysia killed herself - until Destinat's serving girl, Belle du jour, is murdered a few weeks later.  Can the two killings be linked, and is Destinat implicated?   An unscrupulous judge, Mierck, seems to think so...