I've Loved You So Long

The opening shot shows a woman smoking in an airport lounge. She seems lost in herself, her eyes barely alive staring into nothingness, cigarette smoke trailing from her fingertips. This is our first introduction to Juliette, masterfully portrayed by Kristen Scott Thomas, acting and speaking in flawless French. We are familiar with Ms. Scott Thomas portraying witty, urbane Englishwomen, so it comes as a shock to see her willing to look so plain and so haunted.

I won't give out any spoilers, but the basic plot of the movie is about Juliette recently being released from prison where she was incarcerated for 15 years for killing her son. The reasons why she committed the crime are not given, at least for a long time. Juliette, who has been shunned by her friends and most of her family, is taken in by her younger sister, Lea, who tries to restablish the close bond the sisters had while growing up. Lea, a college literature professor, has her own family now, a husband who is very wary of having Juliette in his house, two adopted Vietnamese daughters, and a father-in-law who has suffered a stroke and cannot speak, but who sits in his room all day reading books.

Not a lot happens in the movie in the way of plot. The movie essentially is a document of Juliette's tenative steps back into a normal life. The director focuses on basically the mundane, day-to-day existence of Juliette: her meetings with her odd parole officer, her attempts to get a job, her small steps in getting to know her sister and family members again. It is a quiet film, and thankfully, not melodramatic for the most part.

The movie, altough ostensibly about Juliette's imprisonment and how even outside of prison she is still imprisoned by her thoughts, her memories, her family, and even society, is also about how everyone is trapped in the prisons of their own making. Juliette's sister is trapped in her position at the university and her belief that she must make her family work as a unit; Lea's father-in-law is trapped in the prison of his mind, unable to communicate with words and spending his days enveloped in his books; and even Juliette's parole officer is trapped in his existence at the police station and kept from his children by his ex-wife, always dreaming of a trip to the Orinoco rover basin that he will never see.

There are some frustrating aspects to the film that are worth mentioning. The director does not have a keen sense of pacing. Many scenes go on far too long or not long enough, and a key scene at a crowded dinner table where a dinner guest grills Juliette about where she has been for the past 15 years lacks proper set up and context. And, to be honest, I thought that the ending scene where the sisters confront each other over the reasons behind the killing was far too pat. It wrapped everything up too quickly and nicely. I think there would have been a much more emotionally satisfying ending to have the family accept Juliette for who she is rather than because she gave a plausible for reason for her crime.

But those are minor quibbles about the film. The actors are uniformly wonderful, and Ms. Scott Thomas is riveting. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her perfomance and was wrongfully omitted during the Oscar nominations. You feel every emotion she is going through just by looking at her expressions and body language. She inhabits the character like a second skin. Sometimes I don't think American directors understand how to use Ms. Scott Thomas properly. She never fails to make an impression in her films, and, in my humble opinion, should be regarded in the same breathe as Meryl Streep.