I've Loved You So Long

It would be an act of critical generosity to describe this film as flawed. More accurately, “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a work in which the writer/director, Philippe Claudel, has avoided the tasks he set himself, choosing instead to engage the viewer at the lowest level of sentimentality, counting on the audience’s love affair with Kristin Scott Thomas to breathe oxygen into an airless piece. A slow and intentionally misleading storyline asks the viewer first to try to understand Scott Thomas’ character, Juliette, and then slaps the audience with a volte face that nonetheless could have been compelling if Claudel had used it as something more than a tear-jerker ending.

From the film’s opening image of Juliette—just out of prison after 15 years—waiting at the airport to be picked up by her sister, Lea, it is evident that a secret will ultimately be revealed. If this woman served a long jail sentence, it was obviously her choice. Why and for what would she have been wrongly condemned? Near the story’s end, a circumstantial occurrence reveals that Juliette’s murder of her terminally ill young son was a mercy killing done by her as a doctor to spare the boy the anguished final days of dying. Conveniently, the trial brought none of this to light—no autopsy, no mitigating circumstances, so that Juliette’s right to her martyrdom remained absolute and unchallenged, allowing her to return to society carrying the ultimate stigma of filicide.

This might have been a movie about a woman having found through the darkest secret her only way to cope with her child’s death. The work would then have had its life in the tension between an unrevealed truth and an unbearable agony. Her interactions with the world she has rejoined would offer her the redemptive opportunity to let go of the specialness of secrecy and face openly that even the greatest loss does not equal the end of life.

The time in prison which she engineered, however improbable as credible plot, would then have been a confinement for her unwarranted hubris in allowing a false narrative to dictate a conclusion. When and how would she see her untold tale as a running away from the challenges of life? That sequence might have been compelling.

Unfortunately, the film ignores the impossibility that no one else noticed the child’s disease and disfiguration. As a doctor Juliette processed her son’s blood tests herself and did not feel the need to verify the results or seek other opinions about treatment, nor did she feel the need or obligation to confide in her ex-husband, the boy’s father. No one was to have a hand in this but she.

A very different character could have emerged of a selfish woman struggling with her own inability to allow her child a separate existence, unwilling to grant him his place in the complexity of a mysterious larger world. In her act of mercy, Juliette retains the starring role. There are many ways besides the literal act of murder in which narcissistic and unfulfilled parents can burden, thwart and cripple their children as if they were merely props in a claustrophobic play and not beings with lives of their own.

The parole officer to whom Juliette must report weekly wants only to tell her about his own life and his yearning to go to the Orinoco river, a kind of image for him of journeying to the source, into expansiveness, away from the prosaic routine and disappointment about things not having worked out on a personal level—his divorce and separation from his young daughter. The ’trip to the Orinoco’ ends in his suicide by gunshot; he can find no actual way to enlarge his existence, to incorporate the painful facts of his life into the continuing journey. His is the active version of the symbolic passive suicide which has been Juliette’s fate in failing to confront her unfinished life.

For Juliette, the director conflates discovery with self-discovery; the vignettes of the film seem calculated only for their emotional effect on the audience, not as testament to the complexity of evolving from or evoking depth experience in response to the difficult and tragic realities of life. Since complexity has been absent from her return to society, Juliette’s voyage has had no thrust and the viewer feels tricked and patronized. If it is really only that she needed to tell someone else—or have someone else “know”, what is the point of all she has done and been through? How, after all this, can that make any difference to her? We are left knowing Juliette as little at the end as at the beginning, but with good reason not to trust her or the director.