L'Ombre des femmes (2015)
Directed by Philippe Garrel

Film Review

Philippe Garrel continues to embody the ethos of the French New Wave, even describing himself as a disciple of Jean-Luc Godard, but his overtly Nouvelle Vague style of cinema is beginning to look a little weary and his latest film, L'Ombre des femmes, seems to belong to another time altogether - something that has tumbled out of a 1960s time capsule rather than a film made in the second decade of the third millennium.  For around half a century, Garrel has devoted his art mostly to intimate studies of the complexities of male-female relationships, as dedicated an auteur as Godard but with the compassion of Rohmer and Truffaut.  His 1968 retrospective Les Amants réguliers (2005) rekindled interest in his work and was followed by a series of romantic dramas that play to his strengths as an astute and occasionally cruel observer of human nature.

In common with many of Garrel's recent films, L'Ombre des femmes is photographed in lustrous black and white in a way that vividly evokes the French New Wave in its glorious heyday.  A voiceover commentary (provided by the director's son Louis Garrel, who featured in many of his previous films) adds to this impression, lending a Truffaut-like feel to a tangled love triangle situation that calls to mind Truffaut's own dark study in infidelity, La Peau douce (1964).  The Nouvelle Vague allusions do not end there and you wonder whether Garrel was so hooked up on nostalgia that he gave up trying to impose his own personal stamp on the film.  Another curious thing is that he shares the screenwriting credits with Jean-Claude Carrière, a veteran screenwriter best known for his many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.  Carrière's skewed humour would seem to be a strange bedfellow for Garrel's low-key observational style of drama, but it actually helps to lift the film and prevent it being just a dry retread of Garrel's previous work.

L'Ombre des femmes serves as an effective companion-piece to Garrel's previous film La Jalousie (2013), which is somewhat darker in tone and takes the man's side in an intense romantic entanglement that goes disastrously wrong.  Here, Garrel is resolutely on the side of the women, in particular the wife Manon played with heartrending authenticity by Clotilde Courau.  The husband Pierre (a surprisingly sombre and brutish Stanislas Merhar) is made out to be the villain of the piece, expecting standards of his wife - unwavering infidelity and self-respect - which he has absolutely no intention of applying to himself.  Both Manon and Pierre represent archetypes of a bygone age and they would look patently absurd if this had been presented more as a contemporary drama.  By adopting a Nouvelle Vague-like look for the film, Garrel gives it a timeless quality that allows him to toy with out-dated attitudes without making it obvious that he is himself way behind the times.

In addition to its somewhat démodé character types, the film also suffers from a none-too-subtle connection between the film that Garrel is making (one about duty, betrayal and resistance) and the one that his male protagonist is making (a documentary on the French Resistance which deals with the same themes).  It's the kind of lazy thematic linking that you would expect of a far less experienced and subtle director than Garrel, and the parallels between the film and the film being made within it are too obvious to look anything other than contrived.  Just as the supposed resistance hero in Pierre's film turns out to be not what he seemed, so his mistress is not what she seems (and neither for that matter is Manon).  There's a calculated, mechanistic quality to this film that runs contrary to its natural emotional flow, the sublime acting hindered rather than helped by too polished a script and a mise-en-scène that is too in thrall to the French New Wave to allow the film to acquire its own honest identity.  L'Ombre des femmes is an involving piece that has no difficulty engaging the spectator's emotions, but it doesn't quite have Garrel's distinctive voice nor the purity of expression that sets him apart as one of France's finest auteur filmmakers.

Film Synopsis

Pierre is a filmmaker of modest means who makes documentaries on a shoestring budget with the help of his wife Manon.  At the moment, they are making a film about the French Resistance, and this is how Pierre comes to meet Elisabeth, a trainee film archivist.  The attraction is mutual and the two are soon pursuing an intense love affair, but Pierre has no intention of leaving Manon, whom he loves just as much as his mistress.  When Elisabeth learns that Manon has also embarked on an extramarital affair she cannot prevent herself from divulging this fact to Pierre.  If, by doing this, Elisabeth had hoped to break up Pierre's marriage she is in for a disappointment.  Awareness of his wife's infidelity merely strengthens his emotional bond with Manon...