La Séparation

Is anyone enjoying a happy marriage or a workable relationship in France? Not if that country's recent cinema is any indication. As you might guess from the title, things sure aren't going well in Christian Vincent's La séparation. Following in the footsteps of such un-mating dances as Benoît Jacquot's Seventh Heaven, the film traces the unravelment of love and trust between Pierre (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Isabelle Huppert), an unmarried couple living together with their 18-month-old son. Unlike Heaven, however, La séparation seems more schematic than heartbreaking, the actors providing little sympathy for their miserable, confused characters.

Pierre is a happy dad: in the opening scenes he coos endearments as he videotapes their son sleeping. Unfortunately his wife is less amenable to his affections: she recoils from his embrace, lacing her dinner-party conversation with scarcely veiled sarcasm and contempt. At last she admits that she's having an affair, news that Pierre takes with surprising equanimity. He tolerates the situation for a while, allowing Anne her freedom, until it becomes clear that the separation he really dreads is from his son.

Which is understandable, because Huppert comes off as a self-righteous cold fish. Auteuil doesn't seem much of a bargain either, though his hangdog woefulness sometimes emerges from self-pity to achieve genuine pathos. Although the characters don't convince, the atmosphere of suffocation does, putting La séparation up there with Your Friends & Neighbors as one of the year's worst date movies. In the final scene, when Pierre stumbles stunned and lost through the night, hailing a cab that never comes, Vincent's film captures the devastating recognition that solitude and loss are the rule, love the exception.

-- Peter Keough