La Maison (2007)
Directed by Manuel Poirier

Film Review

Those who appreciate Manuel Poirier's languid, delicately undemonstrative style of cinema will doubtless warm to La Maison, his most emotionally introspective film to date.  The film explores, with Poirier's habitual warmth and sensitivity, the devastating power that childhood memories can exert over us, even when we are well into adulthood, threatening out relationships with others and preventing us from finding happiness elsewhere.  It is a theme that has rarely been tackled in cinema but which, on the strength of what this film offers, is one that clearly merits further exploration.  After all, one of the most potent relationships we have as adults is the one that we have with our childhood past, a relationship that gives us our identity but which also robs us of our freedom.  The house that features in Poirier's film symbolises the burden of childhood, representing both the safe haven we long to return to and the prison from which we can never escape.

La Maison marks the ninth collaboration of Poirier with his favourite actor Sergi López, who is perfectly suited for the director's understated, emotionally repressed approach to film drama.  López's fragile machismo is well-matched by the pent-up sensuality of his co-star, Bérénice Bejo, who shows great promise as a straight dramatic actress (having established herself as a capable comedienne).  As ever, Poirier gets the best out of his actors, although their efforts are occasionally undermined by some heavyhanded screenwriting.  The film's one big failing is a narrative structure which at times feels painfully clunky, disrupting the natural rhythm of the film.   One instance of this is the scene after the auction in which the mysterious rival bidder is revealed - this scene is pretty well superfluous and serves merely to scuttle the emotional power of the preceding sequence and the one that follows it.  Similarly, the way in which Cloé and her sister are introduced, via a similarly disjointed narrative jump, works against the film's natural flow.  How much more coherent and poignant the film would have been if Poirier had stuck with a single point of view (Malo's), instead of embarking on an a series of haphazard digressions purely for narrative expediency.   

Fortunately, López's performance (easily one of his best to date) is sufficient to carry us through Poirier's occasional scripting mishaps and the film not only manages to hold our attention but also moves us in ways that are subtle and hard to define.  The charm of Poirier's cinema lies not so much in what it says (which generally is fairly banal and uninteresting) but in the way in which it compels us to reflect on our own, similar experiences, and regard them in a new light.  Whilst some may carp about its obvious imperfections, La Maison is a film that is sincerely crafted and means something - a worthy follow-up to its director's previous noteworthy meditations on life, Marion (1997), Western (1997) and Te quiero (2001).

Film Synopsis

Malo is a forty-something father of three children who is in the process of getting a divorce.  One day, whilst out with his friends Rémi and Nathalie, he notices a house which is due to be sold at auction.  The house, a solitary building far from the busy town, intrigues him and he goes inside.  In the bare living room, he finds a letter, a letter written by a small girl named Cloé to her father.  Moved by the letter, Malo makes enquiries and tracks down the woman who wrote it, many years ago.  Cloé and her sister have been forced to sell their house after their father died leaving them with a stack of debts.  Malo realises that the house still means a great deal to Cloé so he decides to attend the auction to buy it for her.  Unfortunately, Cloé's former neighbour is just as determined to get his hands on the house and the land that surrounds it...