From the Land of the Moon (Mal
de pierres)
(France/Belgium/Canada,
120 min.)
Dir. Nicole
Garcia, Writ. Nicole Garcia, Jacques Fieschi
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Louis Garrel, Alex Brendemühl
 |
| Pacific Northwest Pictures |
From the Land of the
Moon is a film of a different era. Fifty years ago, it might have been the
stuff of awards and rave reviews. There’s a lot to admire in its prestigious production
that soaks up the scenery the Alps while French superstar Marion Cotillard acts
her heart out playing Gabrielle, a young woman from a small post-World War II
town who draws suspicions of madness because she believes in true love. It’s 2017,
though, and movies need to do more than make their leading ladies long for a
man to earn their laurels.
Garcia conveys Gabrielle’s struggle to find herself in a dry
series of even-handed scenes composed mostly of disconnected medium shots with few
cinematic flourishes. (Camera movement doesn’t seem to find a fan in Miss
Garcia.) There’s an air of malaise (intentional or not) to Gabrielle’s tedious
days waiting for poetry that never happens.
The film loses some of its intelligibility once Garcia
expedites the time frame and ages Gabrielle to bring her to what should be a
shattering revelation of loss. She doesn’t give Cotillard so much as a wrinkle
and while the actress has a timeless beauty and shows some maturity through her
costume changes, From the Land of the
Moon can’t capture Gabrielle’s heartbreak when ten or fifteen years of
unrequited love fly by as if they’re a weekend.
Even when the film begins, Gabrielle looks to be a very
young forty. Garcia doesn’t let the audience get inside Gabrielle’s head in the
early scenes that show the young woman gazing at the reflection of her vagina
in the river or reading poetry alone. One doesn’t know anything about Gabrielle
aside from the sense that she’s an old-school romantic type. From the Land of the Moon keeps her as
little more than a vague Tinder profile that every man in her small town swipes
left in search of a prospective uterus. Ditto her mother, who sees Gabrielle’s
spinster status as a kind of madness and marries her off as a vaccine.
Unhappy before marriage and unhappy after, there’s no cure
for Gabrielle’s miserable state. Her husband, José (Alex Brendemühl),
surprisingly isn’t the one-dimensional oaf one often finds in these kind of
pictures, but he isn’t exactly romantic or responsive either, which leave
Gabrielle unmoved.
All she feels are the pains in her abdomen, which prompt a
spa retreat to the Alps, a meeting with a moody and somewhat sexy officer named
André (Louis Garrel), and the inevitable sexual awakening. Cotillard finds more
to do with her character once Gabrielle escapes to the spa and becomes more
than a passive observer to her own life. The restlessness of her performance evokes
Gabrielle’s untapped desires, but there’s no passion to the film whatsoever,
unfortunately, and even less chemistry between Cotillard and Garrel. From the Land of the Moon, unlike
Gabrielle, never quite finds the spark it needs.
From the Land of the
Moon is now playing in limited release.