Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [29]
Gilles’ Wife takes place in a rural French village in the 1930s and beautifully evokes that time and place. The pace is leisurely and the camera lingers over the simple qualities that made up daily life at a time before television, video games, and the Internet became ubiquitous. When was the last time you saw a movie that paid attention to the sun streaming through the slats of a barn? The sound track is similarly serene, uncomplicated by the roar of jet engines overhead or music playing when a character walks inside a village store.
But this is more than simply a mood piece: it is a powerful story of relationships. Emmanuelle Devos plays Elisa, the loving wife of a factory worker, whose day is filled with household chores and the raising of their twin daughters. She and Gilles make love at night. Their life is uncomplicated and they are content. Elisa’s sister Victorine comes to visit on a regular basis and enjoys spending time with her nieces. Gilles has always liked her but at some point his interest becomes more than casual. Elisa is unaware of the change at first.
When the reality of the situation becomes clear to her, Elisa is distraught. She feels betrayed twice over, but she decides not to let her emotions control her response. She addresses Gilles with calmness and understanding, and says, “I’ll wait till you’re over it.” He responds, “I’ll never be over it.” What is Elisa to do?
Gilles’ Wife is a richly textured movie that almost feels as if it were made in the period it depicts. That is to the credit of director Frédéric Fonteyne, who adapted Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s period novel with Philippe Blasband and Marion Hänsel. He takes his time and makes every scene count. Words cannot express the beauty of Virginie Saint-Martin’s cinematography, which is almost painterly. But the main attraction here is Emmanuelle Devos’s face, which registers so many emotions over the course of the film. We watch her think, gaze, contemplate, and suffer—and we fill in the gaps of dialogue in our mind.
I only wish more filmmakers understood the power of silence, and the way an audience responds to someone thinking on screen.
40. GLOOMY SUNDAY
(1999)
Directed by Rolf Schübel
Screenplay by Rolf Schübel and Ruth Toma
Based on the novel by Nick Barkow
Actors:
ERIKA MAROZSÁN
JOACHIM KRÓL
BEN BECKER
STEFANO DIONISI
ANDRÁS BÁLINT
GÉZA BOROS
ROLF BECKER
ILSE ZIELSTORFF
ULRIKE GROTE
Gloomy Sunday is a foreign film that’s had an unusual history here in the United States. Several years after its release in Europe, it opened in a neighborhood theater in Wilmette, Illinois, and local word of mouth kept it going for more than a year. Another theater in Beverly Hills then gave it a try with the same results. Its leading lady, Erika Marozsán, even made personal appearances there on weekends. How could a film without recognizable stars or a major ad campaign attract this kind of following? The answer lies in the film itself, which has an emotional pull for an older audience, and a European sensibility that speaks to a substantial segment of our population.
Gloomy Sunday is a well-made, old-fashioned romantic drama—the type Hollywood rarely even attempts anymore. It opens in Budapest in the 1990s. An elderly man visits an old haunt for the first time in fifty years. As he dines, he gazes at a framed photograph of a woman who inspired the title song. We then flash back in time.
The story revolves around the gregarious owner of this same restaurant during the late 1930s. Laszlo Szabo (Joachim Król) is in love with his beautiful waitress, Ilona (Marozsán). When he hires a starving pianist named Andras (Stefano Dionisi) to play in his café, he doesn’t anticipate that Ilona will fall in love with him. Or that one of their best customers, a German salesman (Ben Becker) will also fall under her spell. Yet they all manage to remain friends. Then World War