Raoul Ruiz's new film is very hard to review without spoiling it for you. It's a Freudian mystery story set in present-day Paris among welloff people, with a bias toward the occult, but a satisfyingly plausible solution. How do you combine all these tricky elements? Answer: very smoothly.
Isabelle Huppert is celebrating her son's ninth birthday when the child asks: "Were you there when I was born?" Family amusement. Later, the precociously sage little boy looks around their austerely neo-classical house - Huppert is a theatre designer - and says: "I want to go to my home." Puzzlement. He then asks: "Is that man your husband?" Serious concern. When the child persists in going "home", curiosity and anxiety impel Huppert to let him lead her across town to an apartment exotically furnished with tribal artifacts and owned by a woman (Jeanne Balibar) she has never set eyes on, but whom her son embraces with the cry of "Mother."
Huppert keeps her cool, and so does the film. In fact, it's the terrifyingly rational way in which everyone appears to react in a completely irrational situation that contributes to the air of bafflement and unease of Ruiz's film. It has stylistic echoes of Hitchcock's Vertigo, too. Not just the enigma surrounding two apparently distinct yet bizarrely related characters, but also the moment, three-quarters of the way through the story, when we filmgoers are tipped the wink about what's actually going on, and mystery changes into suspense.
No actress can beat Huppert for lengthy takes in which she does nothing, sits immobile or moves meditatively, yet holds your eye as strongly as she did in The Piano Teacher; but she is close run here by Balibar, a fickle-tempered talent fresh from Rivette's Va Savoir. And there are good roles, made even more interesting because we have to supply their motives, played by Charles Berling as Huppert's childish but somewhat brutal psychiatrist brother, Edith Scob as Balibar's slightly eerie neighbour, and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre's au pair, an uncommunicative girl with a secret reason for not joining the family for their meals.
Secret lives, every one of them - cunningly disclosed.
Comedie De L'Innocence
Cert: certPG
