L'amour caché (2007)
Hidden Love (2007)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | 01:35:16 | 6,96 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | 01:35:16 | 6,96 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 224 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama
Screen legend Isabelle Huppert (La Dentellière, Les Soeurs Brontë) headlines acclaimed director Alessandro Capone's gently-spun yet intransigent psychodrama L'Amour caché (2007). Huppert plays Danielle, a middle-aged woman rebounding from the trauma of an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and wrestling resolutely with the inner demons that propelled her into that tragic emotional state. Greta Scacchi (White Mischief) co-stars as Dr. Nielsen, the psychiatrist assigned to guide Danielle through therapy and recovery. Though the patient initially presents herself as unwilling to vocalize, in time she picks up a pen and attempts to write, letting the words flow out of her, cathartically, onto paper. It becomes apparent to both doctor and subject that the source of Danielle's trauma lies in her dysfunctional, estranged relationship with her daughter, Sophie (Mélanie Laurent) - now a contented, healthy wife and mother with a husband and a small child of her own - and that Danielle herself caused the schism by allowing irrational feelings of jealousy and inadequacy to separate her from Sophie. Danielle soon realizes that if she is to make any progress on emotional and psychological levels, she and Sophie must work through the immense obstacle of anger that divides them.
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There seems to be something that especially horrifies us about the failure of a mother to care about–not just provide for, but feel for–her child. This irrational, probably sexist response (it never seems so shocking when it's a father who's uncaring) is primal: each and every one of us has (or had) a mother and craved maternal love, whether she or it was there or not. That fraught, unavoidable connection is omnipresent in Western dramatic history (from Oedipus Rex and Medea through Hamlet and on down) and has, of course, inspired many a movie, from Truffaut's The 400 Blows to Malle's Murmur of the Heart to Bergman's Autumn Sonata to Tom Kalin's underappreciated Savage Grace, and many, many more. In the case of Alessandro Capone's Hidden Love (L'amour caché), the Bergman comparison is apt regarding both its theme and, when the film is at its most fully realized, its style: it is an attempt, and a fairly successful one, to explore, à la the most intense sections of Persona or Autumn Sonata, a mother's troubling indifference, or outright revulsion, toward her own offspring.
L'amour caché (2007)
![L'amour caché (2007)]()
The mother in question, Danielle Marquand, is played by Isabelle Huppert (White Material; Mélanie Laurent (Beginners) is her daughter, Sophie, age 23 in the film's present. Through a series of flashbacks and dreams/hallucinations (often shot in gorgeous black and white or oversaturated colors by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who also shot Antonioni's The Passenger) we learn that the two have had, from the moment of Sophie's birth, a relationship wrenched and torn at every turn by Danielle's seeming inability to have any deep or sincere maternal feelings toward Sophie; by Danielle's consequent guilt and overcompensation; and, subsequently, by Sophie's acting out in reaction to the lack of deep feeling on her mother's part, which she, with a child's unfailing instincts, can sense with certitude.
L'amour caché (2007)
![L'amour caché (2007)]()
Their mutually felt and inflicted cold rage and recrimination has spiraled down to the point that, when we meet Danielle at the beginning of Hidden Love, she is miserably, neurotically ensconced in a high-end mental institution under the close watch and care of a psychoanalyst, Dr. Nielsen (Greta Scacchi, The Player), whose treatment she resists and with whom she generally has an embattled relationship. In the meanwhile, Dr. Nielsen has a strained relationship of her own, her marriage to her renowned colleague Morris (Olivier Gourmet, The Son, Home), a man who, while his wife cannot help carrying Danielle and Sophie's emotional war around inside her, finds it all too easy to separate his work from himself and coolly espouses a sort of anthropological, quasi-social-Darwinian perspective on human familial relationships. The three women, try as they might to understand, help, or reconcile with each other, seem caught in an impasse until an unforeseen tragedy intervenes and breaks it for them.
L'amour caché (2007)
![L'amour caché (2007)]()
The film is strongest when focusing on the back and forth between Danielle and Dr. Nielsen; Huppert, a deservedly legendary actress, is superb as Danielle, and the character and her performance anchor what is, at times, an unfocused story. The scenes with Laurent as Sophie, alone or facing off with her mother or Dr. Nielsen, are also quite good. But the ways in which the scenes are put together do not always seem to make the strongest emotional connections; there seems to have been a search for just the right tone, one that was never really hit upon. The bits with Scacchi and/or Gourmet as the married psychoanalysts do create a nice parallel with and comment upon the therapy scenes, but this is another element that never connects quite as well as it feels like it should. The marriage subplot ends up getting short shrift, which is less confusing or annoying than a source of some puzzlement about why that relationship, whose troubles we have also become involved in, seems to more or less just fade out of the film.
L'amour caché (2007)
![L'amour caché (2007)]()
Still, there is no question that this is Huppert's show, and the temptation to give more of it to her is very understandable. Danielle is the kind of complex, flawed, and troubled character Huppert specializes in. On the whole, Hidden Love could certainly not be ranked with Michael Haneke's great The Piano Teacher; but here, as she did in Haneke's film, Huppert nonchalantly steps out onto the emotional tightrope and walks it from beginning to end with such sensitivity and commitment that, even if this somewhat uneven film did not have its many other praiseworthy qualities, her performance alone would make it worthwhile.
L'amour caché (2007)
![L'amour caché (2007)]()
The film's style is for the most part–with significant contributions from Tovoli's cinematography and composer Lawrence D. "Bull" Morris's sparingly employed, high-strung, often Shining-esque score–very nicely assured. After an initial, worrying tendency to overindulge a bit in slick overediting and slo-mo tricks, the film eventually relaxes into a style that actually does manage some of that impressive, captivating Bergmanesque confidence in quiet, stark, precisely composed and lit scenes bursting with emotional tension, the vestiges of prior psychological violence and the threat of more to come. The film's final, extended long shot is beautiful and meaningful enough to make you forget its weaknesses; there is finally no dialogue, no more accusation or regret, just a moving visual expression of some expansive hope after the film's clinical claustrophobia, and it arrives like a cleansing rain after an arid spell.
L'amour caché (2007)
![L'amour caché (2007)]()
A Bergmanesque tale of a tragically embattled mother-daughter relationship, Hidden Love is, for the most part, a very worthy effort, marred only in spots by a little narrative disorganization here or some incongruously slick stylistic moves there. Isabelle Huppert once again reaffirms her status as one of the world's greatest actresses; the film has many pleasures to offer, but her performance as a mother devastated by her own apparent inability to feel is chief among them, and would in itself be good cause to seek this one out and give it a look. Recommended.
L'amour caché (2007)
Special Features:
- Deleted Scenes
- 'Behind the Scenes' featurette
- Trailer
- TV spots
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