Playing divorced parents embarking on a strange journey into Death Valley, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu bring an easy chemistry and rich shared experience to Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, opening today in the States from Strand. They both play famous actors, one a skeptic and one a life-after-death believer, yoked together on a road trip conceived by their son, who committed suicide in San Francisco several months earlier. He’s written them both letters and given them a map to seven locations, telling them in his posthumously received correspondence that he’ll appear to them at one of the stops. The premise […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2016Greeted with predominantly mixed-to-negative reviews at Cannes, Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love — tonight’s Opening Night selection of this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema — hit me so strongly I had to read up afterwards. Whatever the obvious problems with this movie may be didn’t register with me, so reading the notices helped. This isn’t a case of non-arthouse-friendly viewers finding a movie too slow and boring, but there are, I suppose, some obvious hurdles with this film. It starts as naturalism and unexpectedly keeps left-turning into mysticism, turns too jarring and ill-fitting for some (but, by definition, can’t movies turn […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 3, 2016