24 heures de la vie d'une femme (2002)
Directed by Laurent Bouhnik

Film Review

Laurent Bouhnik's stylish, big budget adaptation of Stefan Zweig's celebrated novel has great strengths, but also some obvious weaknesses.  From a purely technical point of view, the film is impressive - the acting, photography and design are on a par with any quality French film made in recent years.  The film is as visually striking as Bouhnik's previous off-kilter prison drama Zonzon (1998), although somewhat gentler in tone. But as an engaging piece of drama, the film falls way short of its intended mark.  The time-shifting Proustian narrative construction adds little to the central story and, if anything, feels like a consciously arty device to compensate for an unsophisticated plot.  The lack of focus makes it hard to engage with any of the characters - there are in effect three stories being told in parallel and none of them has any real depth or coherence.  Despite these faults, the film does somehow avoid falling into the abyss of pretentious self-indulgence, thanks primarily to some impressive performances from such first rate actors as Agnès Jaoui (the director of the hit comedy Le Goût des autres (2000)) and Bérénice Bejo (Jean Dujardin's co-star in The Artist (2011)).  There are some powerful sequences - notably Marie's first meeting with Anton in the casino - but overall the film lacks focus and dramatic tension, although it is not without charm.

Film Synopsis

As he faces up to his impending death, an elderly man named Louis returns to the Côte d'azur, where he once lived a troubled adolescence.  In a casino, he meets Olivia, an attractive young woman who is full of vitality.  After a sudden bust-up with her boyfriend, Olivia develops a fondness for Louis and stays with him as he recounts a story that was told to him, six decades ago, by a certain Mrs Marie Collins-Brown.  Marie and her sister-in-law are living on the Riviera in the early 1900s when she meets a young Polish man named Anton, a compulsive gambler.  A widow in her thirties, Marie is so moved by Anton's fatal addiction that she is prepared to do anything she can to cure him of his love of gambling.  Twenty years on, Marie recalls this sad story to Louis, an adolescent who has turned against his mother after she left him to go off with her lover...