Over five decades French director Philippe Garrel has honed a distinctive approach to filmmaking that might be described as a cross between Romantic poetry and the experimental cinema of Andy Warhol. Garrel shares with Warhol a cool fascination with downtime, faces in close-up, and the physical properties of film. His ties to classic Romanticism can be felt in his obsession with melancholy, natural beauty, love, and loss of love. His career also might be described as a quixotic mission to show the invisible, as many of his films’ titles suggest: The Inner Scar, Les Hautes Solitudes (which translates roughly as “high solitude”), The Birth of Love, Wild Innocence, and now Jealousy.
Garrel doesn’t provide any clue as to what this phrase means, just as he doesn’t explain why he’d link two shots with a fade-out when no time elapses between them. Both decisions reflect a creative agenda so personal that it borders on the impenetrable, yet the dramatic content is seldom mysterious. The opening scene establishes that Louis. a stage actor living hand to mouth, is leaving Chlothilde for another woman; the second scene jumps directly to the stable postmarriage dynamic between mother, father, and daughter, with Louis dropping off Charlotte after an afternoon visitation. From here he meets up with his current lover, Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), an outspoken actress who wants to live life to the fullest. For the next hour or so Garrel charts, with few digressions, the growing intimacy between these two (and between Claudia and little Charlotte), their unsatisfying period of cohabitation, and their eventual falling-out. After Claudia leaves Louis, he attempts suicide; when he recovers, he learns to take solace in his art and the company of his daughter and older sister.
Directed by Philippe Garrel
