Valley of Love (2015)
Directed by Guillaume Nicloux

Film Review

It has been 35 years since Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert played alongside one another in a feature film, that film being Maurice Pialat's idiosyncratic romance Loulou (1980).  Now, Fate (or, more likely, a film director with a strange sense of humour) has picked them both up and placed them in the most unlikely of places, in a two-handed drama that delights in blurring the edges being reality and fiction but fails to add up to much beyond the obvious pleasure of seeing two of France's greatest actors sparring off one another.  Director Guillaume Nicloux has a reputation as something of an iconoclast, having radically altered the screen personas of Josiane Balasko and Thierry Lhermitte in two earlier films (Cette femme-là and Une affaire privée), but in Valley of Love he doesn't so much subvert as prostrate himself before two of cinema's most beloved icons.

It is no accident that the characters that Huppert and Depardieu portray in this film share their first names.  Neither is it fortuitous that their characters are world famous film stars who have put their career before their private lives.  The central question at the heart of the film - why do an estranged couple so willingly agree to go on a tour of one of the most inhospitable places on Earth? - echoes the more obvious question: why would two highly respected actors agree to appear in such a low-key and singularly weird film?  For the characters in the film, the answers are readily forthcoming: a shared need to bury their guilt and seek closure on their son's death.  For the actors who play them we can only speculate: personal catharsis or just the need to take time out from their busy schedules?

For Depardieu, the connection between the film and real life incident is more apparent and poignant.  It wasn't that long ago that his own son Guillaume (coincidentally the same name as the director's) died prematurely young just when his own acting career was taking off in a big way.  When Depardieu reads the letters from his fictional dead son in the film, his voice audibly breaks and the inner pain is expressed in every part of his tragi-comic face.  From a distance, both Depardieu and Huppert look like comicbook caricatures of their real selves - the former a prematurely aged juvenile carrying far too many kilos, the latter an over-the-hill diva trying pathetically to look as if she is still twenty, as thin as a rake and as prickly as a cactus soaked in vinegar.  The stars don't quite send themselves up, but there is more than a hint of intentional self-mockery.  This makes the film's more sober moments of reflection all the more surprising and powerful, and what makes Valley of Love worth watching is the subtle rapport that develops between the two main characters, one that possibly gives a glimpse into the actors' inner lives, showing the wounds that have yet to heal and the regrets that still rankle.

Valley of Love is a film that, without its charismatic leads, would add up to precisely nothing.  Nicloux's idea presumably was to take two stars, put them in a desert, and see what develops.  As a concept, it's pretty empty, and so is the film that results - a quasi-mystical, pseudo-religious road movie that ambles along pleasantly but doesn't really go anywhere.  One strangely surreal incident offers a fleeting taste of where Nicloux may have taken the film had he been a little more adventurous, but this proves to be a false dawn and the film continues down its prosaic, non-commital path to a totally unsatisfying destination.  With not much inspiration in evidence either in the writing or direction, it is left to the stunning location and attention-hogging lead actors to rescue this ill-conceived enterprise.  Depardieu, Huppert and the savage beauty of one of America's greatest national parks make Valley of Love a quaint and mildly absorbing film, but it's unlikely that it will change your life.

Film Synopsis

Isabelle and Gérard, two well-known film actors, keep a strange kind of rendezvous in Death Valley, California.  They haven't seen each other for years and it is at the invitation of their son Michel, a photographer who committed suicide six months ago, that they are here, alone together in this awesome landscape.  Despite the apparent absurdity of the situation and the sweltering heat, Isabelle and Gérard decide to follow through the strange programme that their son has organised for them, unsure what his motives were for bringing them together in one of the most desolate places on Earth...