Devos' ambiguous portrait of a wife wronged.
What single moment in
The Graduate
elevates it from being a cute period piece with some funny dialogue about plastic? The final scene, of course, in which the
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young lovers, having successfully eloped, collapse breathless and triumphant in the back of the bus-when suddenly the unavoidability of all that lies ahead writes itself across their faces: the inescapable, and its terrible ambiguity.
It's a similar ambiguity which riddles 2004's
Gilles' Wife
-with Emmanuelle Devos (
Kings and Queen
)-in which uncertainty plays across her face like light on water, through scene after scene nearly devoid of dialogue. Even when wordless, Devos is magnificent as farmwife Elisa; like Anouk Aimée she has the ability to seem complex and simple at the same time: both utterly vulnerable, every expression transparent to the camera yet also somehow unknowable, the
eidos
of the eternal feminine. This is Devos' film, absolutely, and she seizes it between her teeth and runs.
Good thing, because otherwise the daytime-soap storyline of
Gilles' Wife
might be a bit much to take. Elisa is,
évidemment
, the wife of factory worker Gilles (Clovis Cornillac). Their marriage is viscerally satisfying, with strong sexual love and a rich domestic contentment; Elisa has twin girls, then a son, and as a family they enjoy the hard work and simple pleasures of countryside French life in the late 1930s. The girls particularly enjoy visits from Elisa's younger sister, Aunt Victorine (Laura Smet).
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Hèlas
, so does Gilles…and eventually it becomes impossible to ignore the mounting evidence that Gilles and Victorine are having an affair. Yet it's not in Elisa's depths of introverted patience to demand a choice from Gilles or kick him to the curb, even when he becomes increasingly unhinged and violent; still, how much can she take? Unfortunately, the writers resolve all this with an abrupt, tacked-on melodramatic ending which nearly ruins all the ambiguity they've spent the preceding hour and a half constructing so meticulously.
It doesn't hurt that the cinematography of
Gilles' Wife
aims for maximum poignancy. It's as though the DP moved in with the family and concentrated on recording the household's most intimate doings over the course of several years, as lushly as possible. Light can't just fall artlessly across floor tiles; it has to be ripe, plangent, late-summer light. The flat beauty of Elisa quietly at her housework suggests an aesthetic reason for this film's existence-but the real marvel here, and reason not to miss
Gilles' Wife
, is Devos' innocent enigma, her smile ever asking questions to which existence may offer no answers.
