Why don’t they make movies in favor of capital punishment? Actually, if you consider vigilante and action flicks or any movie in which the good guy kills the bad guy, that’s about all they make. Films that take the other side of the issue tend to stick out because they’re polemical and more earnest than entertaining. Not so Patrice Leconte’s The Widow of St. Pierre, a wrenching melodrama whose politics are submerged below its genuine emotion and which can take its place among such other great films on the subject as I Want To Live!, In Cold Blood, and A Short Film About Killing.

The key to its success (and that of those other three movies) is the long delay between crime and punishment. Revenge, in cinema, is best served piping hot; the colder it gets, the more the common humanity of the intended victim is recognized. Set on the island of St. Pierre, a French possession off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1850, Widow opens with an especially unattractive abomination. Two drunken fishermen, on shore after a long haul at sea, stagger to their captain’s cottage to confront him. A knife is produced and it all ends badly. The two are convicted of murder, and one, Neel Auguste (Serbian director Emir Kusturica, like a bearish Kris Kristofferson) is sentenced to death.

Easier said than done. St. Pierre has no guillotine (in French slang, the “widow” of the title) and rather than appear weak-willed and commute the sentence, the island authorities send word back to Paris (itself in the midst of revolutionary and reactionary turmoil) to ship one over. Meanwhile, the condemned man becomes the responsibility of Jean, the captain in charge of the local garrison. Played by Daniel Auteuil in his finest performance, Jean is an enigmatic figure: aloof and out of place, he’s apparently been exiled to St. Pierre from Paris. No one is sure why, though his progressive views and his idolization of his beautiful, upper-crust wife, Pauline (Juliette Binoche, in the role for which she should have received her Oscar nomination), might have something to do with it.

Pauline has a thing about rehabilitation and nurturing, and she enlists the hulking, now docile Auguste to build a greenhouse and perform other errands. As the months pass while the island awaits the guillotine, her flowers bloom in the hothouse and the prisoner becomes a local hero. Here Leconte overstates his case, transforming the killer into a saint who repairs roofs and shovels snow — and in one surreal if overwrought scene, into a superhero as he saves the island’s only tavern, and its owner, from plummeting to disaster. Even when Auguste impregnates one of the local widows as he awaits the arrival of the “widow” that is his fate, he does the right thing by marrying her.

Ambiguity shadows the altruism of Jean and Pauline, however, and together with Auguste they form an ambiguous romantic triangle. Something about the impending execution arouses not only Pauline’s outrage but her desire; just mention the word “guillotine” and she and her husband start tearing off their clothes. Auguste, the Beast to Pauline’s Beauty, seems to embody an erotic force that revitalizes not only her marriage but the bleak life of the island as well. No wonder the effete bureaucrats who run the place want to see the sentence carried out, especially when the poor rally around the condemned giant as the time of execution draws near. Cutting off his head will be an Oedipal castration of those who dare defy the patriarchal authority.

But Widow is not so much a political or Freudian parable as it is a personal one, with the stark island, magnificently photographed in corroded shades of gray and green by Eduardo Sarra (who brought a similar ecstatic, elegiacal tone to Jude and The Wings of a Dove), providing a stark microcosm and with Auguste serving not just as a cause célèbre but as an Everyman. His death sentence is common to all, his thoughtless crime is one anyone might be capable of, and his redemption is universal. The elements with which Leconte relates this allegory are deceptively simple but infinitely resonant — a knife, a horse, a woman’s scarf, the sea, the captain’s fatalistic smile. Neither does this director have much use for sentimentality — compare his depiction of children with those in such kneejerk exercises in political correctness as Chocolat. By the film’s cathartic, eloquent conclusion, it’s almost possible to believe that love not only can transform those who kill but can transcend death itself.

Issue Date: March 29-April 5, 2001