Landes (2013)
Directed by François-Xavier Vives

Film Review

After an absence of almost two years Marie Gillain returns to our screens in style, her talents exploited to the full in her role as a headstrong champion of technological progress in this picturesque period piece from director François-Xavier Vives.  Initially a documentary filmmaker, Vives first won acclaim for his film 1860 sur l'extrême horizon (1995), a fascinating profile of the 19th century photographer Félix Arnaudin.  This he followed with a documentary short, Noli Me Tangere (2003), before embarking on his first fictional  feature, Landes, inspired by the life of one of his illustrious forebears.  Having grown up in the Landes, Vives has formed a profound attachment to the region, and this shows in his film, where the bleak woody setting is as much a part of its fabric as the rocky desert landscape is in a John Ford western.

Throughout much of the 19th century, Landes was largely covered with pine plantations, owned by wealthy landowners who treated their workers (gemmeurs) almost as badly as the surfs in pre-revolutionary Russia.  The period that Vives explores in his film, the 1920s, is one where this archaic feudal system is about to come to a dramatic end, amidst the whirlwind of social change that swept across Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.  Caught between her family, who are determined to hold onto the ways of the past that have made them rich, and her workers, who are hellbent on getting a better deal for themselves, the film's heroine Liéna is overtaken by what seems to be a fool's errand, playing with a new-fangled invention that no one seems to be interested in: electricity.

Through Marie Gillain's engaging and nuanced portrayal, Liéna is revealed to be anything but a deluded fool.  A driven idealist, she will become part of the immense social changes that are taking place around her, but because she is a mere woman, secure in her bubble of privilege, no one can yet see this.  Stubbornly dedicated to fulfilling the ambition of her recently deceased husband (we cannot be sure whether it is altruism that drives her on or merely devotion to the man she has lost), Liéna finds herself alone, hemmed in on all sides by hostile forces, and the towering pine trees that surround her merely add to this cruel sense of isolation and confinement.

Landes is the kind of film that French cinema has traditionally excelled in, an elegantly crafted period drama that authentically evokes a period of French history.  Emmanuel Soyer's sombre photography of the seemingly endless pine forests endows the film with an austere romantic quality that serves as a visual leitmotif for the untamed, indomitable temperament of the heroine as she pursues her seemingly futile enterprise to bring light to a region that badly needs it.  The only areas where the film disappoints are its overly conventional mise-en-scène, which lacks the inspired touch in all of its key dramatic moments, and a surfeit of thinly sketched secondary characters.  Vives' two main sources of inspiration - Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) and Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985) - are easily spotted, and like these two remarkable films Landes offers a compelling portrait of a heroic female who is driven to achieve great things against all the odds.

Film Synopsis

On her husband's death, Liéna Duprat, a woman in her mid-thirties, inherits a vast pine forest in the heart of the Landes department of southwest France.  She leaves the running of the plantation to her estate manager, Txomin Iban, so that she can dedicate herself to making her husband's dream a reality - to bring electricity to the whole region.  Unfortunately, this is the 1920s, a time when women have little influence over the affairs of men.  Liéna soon finds she is opposed on two fronts, by her family who regard her as a traitor to their class, and by her workers who see her as a meddlesome fool.  Stubbornly, she perseveres, only to discover that there are more important battles to be fought...