La Vie promise (2002)
Directed by Olivier Dahan

Film Review

After his dark take on a familiar fairytale, Le Petit Poucet (2001), director Olivier Dahan takes us on another, even weirder, fantasy excursion, a distinctly warped variation on that ever-popular cinematic genre - the road movie.  La Vie promise is a gutsily self-conscious oddity of a film that slips capriciously between hard-edge realism and dreamlike visual ballad without ever managing to crystallise into a satisfying whole.  It's more of the same kind of debauched semi-brilliant, semi-offputting genre-hopping potpourri that seems to have become the defining aspect of Dahan's distinctive but not entirely convincing brand of auteur cinema.

Dahan's flirtations with mainstream cinema - his biopics La Môme (2007) and Grace of Monacco (2014), and action-thriller Les Rivières pourpres 2 (2004) - may appear sickeningly populist but they tend to have much more in the way of artistic self-discipline and material substance than his more daring but generally woollier auteur pieces. La Vie promise suffers from its director's prone for stylistic excess and seeming inability to construct a coherent narrative.  The characters are, typical of Dahan, superficially drawn and painful prone to cliché; the wobbly storyline doubly so.  Instead of genuine emotion, the film resorts to cheap pathos of the most lamentable kind and struggles to engage with its audience in any meaningful way.

Dahan's contribution to the film is one of abject failure, but the same cannot be said of its lead actress, Isabelle Huppert, who has an unerring gift for salvaging just about any film - no matter how dire - she happens to get herself into.  Huppert is one of those few actors who scarcely needs a script to turn in a stunning performance, which is just as well for directors like Dahan for whom screenwriting is a painful chore he'd rather overlook (at least, that is how it seems to me).  Transformed virtually beyond recognition by a remarkable make-up job, Huppert does everything she can to alienate the spectator from her, but as unsympathetic and vacuous as her character is, she still remains the emotional core of the film, the one thing that keeps us involved.

Supporting artistes Pascal Greggory and Maud Forget put in some great work also, but it is the leading lady that monopolises our attention and carries us through this excruciating artless wonder.  Once again, Huppert takes us by surprise with another bewildering exhibition of female perversion - a mother who loathes her daughter, an inwardly fragile hooker who cannot help being drawn to brutes who are patently no good for her.  La Vie promise would have been an unbearable car crash of a film without the presence of this unique acting talent, but even with Huppert's totally enthralling performance it still leaves you wishing you had done some something else with your time.

Film Synopsis

Sylvia is a forty-something prostitute who makes a reasonable living for herself, picking up clients on the streets of Nice.  She has no time for her grown-up daughter Laurence, with whom she has never been particularly close.   One night, as her mother is being violently assaulted, Laurence is driven to kill a man.  In the grip of panic, the two women suddenly take flight and set off on a desperate quest to find Sylvia's first husband, with whom she had a son.  On the way, they encounter a man named Joshua who is on bail and has no intention of being sent back to prison.  Sylvia and Laurence fall out again and go their separate ways...