I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime)

I can’t find a reference to this movie on the blog, but it is the kind of title that the search function does not easily find. So apologies if there is already a thread. The plot is pretty straightforward: Juliette (Kristen Scott Thomas) is released from prison having served fifteen years for the murder of her six-year old son. She goes to live with her younger sister (who was barely a teenager when she was imprisoned), the sister’s husband and their two adopted Vietnamese children. At first, Juliette is practically catatonic, affectless most of the time, but ready to snap at people who tiptoe around her situation or use polite euphemisms (“‘Inside’? It’s called prison.”). The great bulk of the movie traces the slow thaw and return to normality of Juliette, as people come to terms with her, and she finds herself once again able to love: her nieces, her sister, a man.

It is by no means a great movie, but it is a great performance by Scott Thomas. She does wonderful work slowly, almost imperceptibly, transforming herself. The tone of her voice (most of the time completely fluent in French, but with an occasional English accent when she slows down her speech) and even the way she carries herself change as she becomes more comfortable with herself and her surroundings. Unfortunately, the others actors are nowhere near as good, caricatures to a man and woman. The husband, Luc, is especially one dimensional (but he is forced to portray someone who is first revolted by Juliette but then comes to rely on her for babysitting). An idyllic scene of friends partying in the countryside rings false at every turn.

The last fifteen minutes of the movie are deeply disappointing. A discovery is made which seems to redeem Juliette, which in turn undermines much of the power of the movie in the first place, and it leads to some high melodrama as Juliette and Lea scream at each other. However, for all its flaws, Scott Thomas’s performance makes this worth watching.

3 thoughts on “I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime)”

  1. I too was disappointed by the third act “reveal” (when you think it through the “discovery” really doesn’t make any sense and is a throwback to the maternal weepies of yore), but Scott Thomas is very good. She’s also very good in Tell No One though that film lacks this one’s psychological pyrotechnics.

  2. i liked this very much, for all the reasons y’all mention, plus others — the incompleteness of just about every scene, the unabashedly loving presence of the younger sister, who seems, in defiance of all realism, so solidly and unproblematically and sweetly there that i could not but love her. untortured women who are nor prostitutes? i’ll take ’em any time. the third act is indeed on the pat ‘n cheesy side, but i liked it nonetheless, for the issues it brings up. DON’T READ ON IF YOU DON’T WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED FOR YOU. it is, of course, entirely unrealistic (the true story didn’t come out with an autopsy? she whisked the boy away for how long exactly? etc.), but it brings up the complex insularity of mother and child, from which fathers are de facto or the iure excluded. or are they? also, the no-win, always-already-check-mated condition of motherhood, since if you are your child’s only world and only master, every bad decision and every fuck-up, including death, is your fault. juliette says this explicitly when she equates a child’s death to life imprisonment for the mother. lea implicitly agrees by denying herself biological motherhood and opting instead for visibly non-biologically-related children. the scene with the elderly mother in the nursing home is heartbreaking. i imagine the fathers on this blog might chomp at the bit here, and rightly so. but there is a tremendous burden placed (by nature? by society? by both?) on motherhood, and i enjoyed (well…) seeing it so starkly presented.

    i wonder if nikki has seen this. she has a thing for mothers who kill their kids…

  3. I don’t have much to add, but also loved the performances by both Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein. Also the camerawork/direction. Certain scenes and even minor characters seemed perfect to me, done with very little. I loved the changes on Juliette’s face as she waits for her sister to pick her up, and the fear that she won’t… The ease/memory-at-work when she goes to a cafe… The swimming pool whose shape we never fully see, giving what should be a safe comfortable surrounding enough unease to let us feel a bit of what Juliette feels…

    The 3rd act reveal didn’t bother me. For me, it was much more about just watching Juliette come back to life, guided by her sister Léa.

    More movies like this please.

    Also, IMDB claims that this movie is Philippe Claudel’s only job directing. Wow. I’m impressed.

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