UK Edition
Review
From the Land of the Moon review: Marion Cotillard deserves better than this kidney stone sex romp
Dir: Nicole Garcia; Starring: Marion Cotillard, Alex Brendemühl, Louis Garrel, Brigitte Rouan, Victoire Du Bois. Cert 15, 120 min.
As one of the most respected French actresses working today, and one of only four in history to be anointed with an Oscar, it feels like some kind of administrative oversight that Marion Cotillard hasn’t yet won a best actress prize at Cannes.
At last year’s festival, Marion Cotillard took her fifth and sixth swings at a best actress prize, with a major supporting role in Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World, and the lead one in this period melodrama from Nicola Garcia. Throw in the messy Ismael's Ghosts at the 2017 festival, and there's not much to say at this juncture other than roll on the eighth.
Cotillard is capable of vastly more than she’s allowed to deliver in any of these groomed, constricting films – though at least in Garcia’s, released in the UK over a year after its initial premiere, her raw star quality just about punctures the biscuit-tin prettiness of its surface.
Cotillard plays Gabrielle, a Provençal lavender farmer’s daughter who’s waging a lifelong war against sexual frustration. (The 2006 Italian novella from which the film was adapted, Mal di Pietre, begins in Sardinia.) Nothing matters to her more than satisfaction. She even prays for it at night: “the principle thing” is her supplicatory euphemism – and the kidney stones that torment her could be a physical manifestation of her aches of unfulfillment.
As a young woman, we first see her standing naked from the waist down in a river, cooling her nether regions in the rushing water. There’s no rush of steam or "tsssss" sound effect, but you get the general point.
There’s a disastrous flirtation with the (married) village schoolteacher after he lends her a copy of Wuthering Heights: big mistake. At night, she runs her tongue over the inscription of his name inside the cover, one of a handful of odd erotic details here that register nicely. And Cotillard, who’s now 40, gets the coltish, questioning physicality of a younger woman exactly right, and ages seamlessly over the course of the two-decade story.
Gabrielle’s mother (Brigitte Rouan) senses trouble, so gives her a choice: either marry dependable, swarthily handsome bricklayer José (Alex Brendemühl), or check into a sanatorium. Her daughter chooses option A, though she has little sexual interest in her new husband, and he only accedes because of a generous dowry.
Their union splutters along – there’s a clumsy scene in which she sparks up mutual desire by dressing like a prostitute – but soon José packs her off to an alpine clinic to have her kidney stones treated, which he hopes will also dissipate her lust.
“What if I don’t want to be cured?”, Gabrielle snaps back in the doctor’s surgery, which is the film’s core philosophy in a nutshell. From the Land of the Moon is a story about how good it feels to feel very, very bad – and how a life lived in rapturous misery is somehow more valuable than mild domestic contentment. That might ring truer if Garcia wasn’t working in such a starchy register, and if the plot’s horrendously executed, serves-you-right twist ending didn’t make Gabrielle look less like a tortured heroine than a graceless imbecile.
Exactly what happens isn’t worth going into here – and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you – but it involves one of Gabrielle’s fellow inmates at the clinic. Played by Louis Garrel, he’s the debonair Lieutenant André Sauvage – a kind of Byronic take on Magic Mike, who puffs opium in his chambers and gives Gabrielle the “principle thing” she’s been looking for, over and over and every which way, until the kidney stones are gone.
You don’t get that kind of thing on the NHS – but you do, with reasonable frequency, on Sunday evening television, which is where this very harmlessly tempestuous tale might feel most at home.