Pour une femme (2013)
Directed by Diane Kurys

Film Review

With Pour une femme, director Diane Kurys completes a quartet of films in which she draws on her own family history and personal experiences, perhaps in an attempt to understand where she comes from and who she is.  The quest for identity is certainly a prevailing theme in Kurys's work, although this seems to have turned into a full-blown obsession with her latest film, which has the slightly off-putting whiff of narcissism about it, something that its pleasing production values and stellar cast line-up cannot disguise.  The opening credits feel like a self-conscious gambol down memory lane, with Kurys casually referencing the theme of her first (and most inspired film) Diabolo menthe (1977), an enchanting portrait of her adolescent years.

Kurys continued her family saga with Coup de foudre (1983) and La Baule-les-Pins (1990), and having watched these you'd have thought the independently minded director would have exhausted her store of family secrets.  Not so.  Pour une femme offers more lurid exposés, although its similarity to Claude Miller's Un Secret (2007) diminishes the dramatic power of these revelations somewhat.  As in Miller's film, the narrative flashes backwards and forwards (here between the 1980s and the late 1940s), in a way that feels self-consciously arty and makes the narrative flow unnecessarily uneven and disjointed.  The sad truth is that if Kurys had opted for a simpler, linear narrative, it would have been much easier to see Pour une femme for what it is - a limp and somewhat dated melodrama lacking in character depth and originality.

As ever, Kurys assembles a first rate cast who more than do justice to her overwrought screenplay.  After Miou-Miou and Isabelle Huppert, it is now the turn of Mélanie Thierry to play her mother Léna, and she does so with surprising finesse, underplaying a role that could so easily have ended up resembling a heroine from one of those Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s.  Benoît Magimel (the male lead in the director's previous period piece Les Enfants du siècle) is less successful as Kurys's father, particularly in the present days scenes in which, buried under several tons of latex to make him look old, he appears faintly comical.

Far more impressive is Nicolas Duvauchelle, who, as Kurys's black sheep uncle, brings a special panache and authenticity to the film, snatching it from the mediocre path it so evidently wants to follow.  Duvauchelle is shaping up to be one of France's finest screen actors and here he impresses both with the subtlety of his art and the ease with which he fits into a past era, genuinely looking as if he has just lived through the Second World War.  With a strong supporting cast that includes Sylvie Testud, Denis Podalydès, Clotilde Hesme and Clément Sibony - all excellent - Pour une femme definitely does not disappoint on the acting front.  Gilles Henry's alluring photography adds further lustre to the film, although ultimately it is Kurys's lack of ambition and imagination that prevents it from being something special.  Pour une femme is an engaging period drama but it somehow lacks the depth and sincerity of its director's previous work.

Film Synopsis

After the death of her mother, Anne, a 35-year-old writer, makes a shocking discovery.  An old photograph casts doubts on her origins and leads her to uncover a long forgotten family secret.  It all began shortly after Anne's parents, Michel and Léna, began their married life together in Lyon, just after the war.  One day, Michel's brother Jean appears from nowhere, some years after he was thought to have been killed in the course of his heroic wartime exploits.  The young couple insist that Jean moves in with them, and so begins a tale of illicit romance that, in years to come, no one will want to remember...