Éternité (2016)
Directed by Tran Anh Hung

Film Review

For his first French language feature, Vietnamese film director Tran Anh Hung set himself the challenge of adapting Alice Ferney's 1995 novel L'Élégance des veuves.  Instead of doing the obvious, which is to turn the novel into a conventional family saga, Tran extracts its core essentials and transforms all this into a rolling tapestry representing the continuing rotation of the wheel of life, in which the human protagonists are reduced to baby-producing machines that have no other purpose than to be born, fall in love, procreate and die.  It's a depressing - and perhaps somewhat cynical - résumé of why we are here, but Tran gets so caught up in his sublime artistry that it probably never occurred to him what a deeply pessimistic assessment of life his film presents.

The aptly titled Éternité is depressing not only because of what it says about human life (which is basically that we are here only to act as links in a long chain of existence) but also because it is so brazenly in love with its own florid artistry.  A more off-puttingly narcissistic film you can hardly imagine.  The lead actresses - Audrey Tautou, Bérénice Béjo, Mélanie Laurent - were no doubt chosen not because of their talent, but because of their obvious picturesque qualities.  The locations are pristine, the photography worthy of any self-respecting chocolate box.  The result is a film that is gorgeous to look but utterly excruciating so sit through.  Babies are born - in copious quantities.  Some make it to adulthood, many are struck down and die hideous deaths.  Those that are miraculously spared by the Grim Reaper get married and make more babies, and so on, and on, and on...  The film makes hardly any attempt to give these individuals any identity.  They are just anonymous baby making automota.  Dialogue is sparse to the point of being virtually redundant and what exposition there is is mostly delivered by a dreary voiceover that soon becomes irritating to the Nth degree.  Éternité is a self-adoring art film that positively wallows in its gleaming vacuity. The worse thing about it is that it completely misses the point as to what life is about.

Film Synopsis

In France towards the end of the 1800s, Valentine is barely twenty old when she gets married to her beloved Jules.  Widowed all too soon, her life is marred by  many other tragedies, but her son Henri survives to adulthood and he himself gets married, to Mathilde, and they soon start a family. Mathilde's friend, Gabrielle, lives in the same building and has similar experiences.  Mathilde will have to suffer her own share of woes before her life is done.  And then there is another Valentine, who, at the end of the 20th century, is running across Paris towards the man she loves.  The cycle of birth and death continues, driven by love, an ever-repeating pattern...