I think I would prefer to see a film based on what happens after the ending. There needs to be more exploration of Gabrielle's psyche. That would be far more interesting than what we have to work with here.Marion Cotillard is a wonderful actress and can express so much with her eyes, but the screenwriters can't seem to make up their minds about who Gabrielle is. Is she headstrong and rebellious or delusionally ill?Also not helping the screenplay is the director's vague timeline. We don't know exactly when this is set, presumably after WWII, but a 14 or 15-year period flies by without hardly a mention. Just how did Gabrielle and José manage to stay together during those long years?

Gabrielle, a stunning embodiment of 1950s Provence hysteria in full HD, yearns, craves and longs. Her oozing desire is disruptive to those around her and excruciatingly painful for her to bear, pushing her into silently abundant jouissance beyond words, which passes through her body in cramps of both pain and pleasure. Bearing such free-floating desire in turn makes Gabrielle barren - her wandering womb (the ancient Greek explanation for hysteria) refuses to stay attached to one place and nurture a fetus, conceived in what Gabrielle perceives a loveless marriage with Jose.Diagnosed with kidney stones as the scientific explanation for her ailments, Gabrielle is subsequently sent off to a mountain resort, one with uncanny ability to dive into the hemispheres of the unconscious mind, strangely resembling Mann's Magic Mountain, thus allowing Gabrielle to spill her desire over reality itself, over time and memory as she meets a charming young man, physically and emotionally absent enough for her to project her longing onto him, for him to play a phantasmatic figure in her own monodrama of Wuthering Heights. She can finally live her jouissance fully and completely by bringing her unconscious phantasies to life as the object of these phantasies, on the other hand, slips into death. The love scene portraying the perfect union comes to stand for a breathtaking example of how the mechanisms of trauma, repression and narcissistic loss (melancholia) work. The trauma of loss (not of the man Gabrielle thought she had loved, but of her own narcissistic self in and with his death) becomes repressed and another scene happens in Gabrielle's mind instead, which secures linearity of Gabrielle's historic self. She can only come to decipher this event years later via the narrative of the silent Jose, whose silences had been nurturing silent gaps in Gabrielle's memory until she was finally ready to bear them. Until she was finally ready for a dialogue. Until she was finally ready to hear Jose speak his story. This film is a remarkable narrative of a ruthless abundance of feminine desire that longs for a language to speak itself, and take ownership of the ambivalent continuity of self, which is all but linear. Cotillard is exquisite in this role, and so is the cinematographic gaze following movements of her wandering/wuthering womb.

Greetings again from the darkness. Director Nicole Garcia (The Adversary, 2002) takes the best-selling novel from Milena Agus and hearkens back to good old-fashioned movie melodrama – with a French twist. Of course, most any project is elevated with the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard in the lead role. Few can suffer on screen as expertly as Ms. Cotillard, and she conveys that disquiet through most of this story.What is love? You'd best not look to Gabrielle (Cotillard) for clarification. As a young woman, her search for love and sexual fulfillment follows the fantasies of the novels she reads (Wuthering Heights). Her corresponding inappropriate behavior teeters between delusion and hysteria. It's the 1950's in rural France, so her actions and attitude are not much appreciated, and her parents bribe Jose (Alex Brendemuhl), a local bricklayer, to marry Gabrielle. She is then given the choice of (an "arranged") marriage or a mental institution.As a romantic dreamer whose blurred reality expects love to mirror those romance novels, Gabrielle's self-centeredness and failure to grasp reality results in a loveless marriage – and easily one of the most uncomfortable lovemaking scenes in the history of French cinema. Beyond that, severe kidney stones make it impossible for her to bear children. In hopes of "the cure", she is sent for treatment to a spa in the Alps (it's the same spa from Paolo Sorrentino's 2015 film YOUTH).While at the spa, she meets handsome Andre (Louis Garrel), a gravely ill soldier from the Indochina War. Gabrielle imagines Andre to be everything she dreamt a lover should be (except for that whole sickness thing). The contrast between the two love-making sessions is startling, and it seems as though Gabrielle has found her bliss.The years pass after her release from the spa, and Gabrielle makes one mistake after another … blind to what and who is right in front of her … while holding on to the dreamer's dream. She is certainly not a likable person, and is downright cruel to her loyal (and extremely quiet) husband Jose. However, Ms. Cotillard is such an accomplished actress that we somehow pull for Gabrielle to "snap out of it".The novel was adapted by Jacques Fieschi, Natalie Carter and director Garcia, and you'll likely either be a fan or not, depending on your taste for old-fashioned melodrama. Despite numerous awkward moments, it's beautifully photographed by cinematographer Christophe Beaucame. Additionally, the music plays a vital role here – both composer Daniel Pemberton's use of the violin, and the duality of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto that connects Gabrielle's two worlds. You may say she's a dreamer, but I hope she's the only one.

I will be honest, I did see this film because it is directed by Nicole Garcia, one outstanding female French director, the best I guess. She has a very sensitive way of filming. So, I did go to see this film without hesitating. And of course I don't regret it at all. Marion Cotillard, whom I don't particularly appreciate, is at her best here. Although I don't crave for her, she is a damn good actress, but sorry, I felt a little emptiness here, I don't really know where. Something missed somewhere. The actors and actresses around her are flawless, but I persist on my opinion. I don't think that's a matter of directing. Not with Nicole Garcia. Maybe because this kind of scheme has already been told a hundred times before. But it remains a good film.