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She Speaks Fluent French, Too! | Kristin Scott Thomas continues to prove her total awesomeness with her foreign-language performance in I’ve Loved You So Long.

I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG
Directed by Philippe Claudel. Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius. Opens Fri, Dec 26.
***

Near the climax of I’ve Loved You So Long, a tearful woman sits in a doctor’s office. She has brought him a piece of paper with cryptic medical notes on it, and he looks up at her with a look of shock on his face. “Where did you get this photocopy?” he asks her, aghast.

This is meant to be a gut-punch of a scene, as Léa Fontaine (Elsa Zylberstein) finally begins to understand what drove her sister Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) to murder 15 years earlier — a crime for which she has only just been released from prison. (She has since moved into Léa’s guest room.) But it doesn’t work, despite Zylberstein’s solid performance as a conflicted but essentially well-meaning sibling. Why not?

Because nobody would say the word “photocopy” in that sentence. It’s completely artificial. Writer/director Philippe Claudel clearly needed to convey that Léa has made a copy of Juliette’s document so she wouldn’t notice it missing, but he didn’t know how to properly show it. So he tells it, awkwardly, and the façade of reality crumbles. We are hearing the squeaks of a poorly oiled machine.

Similar problems plague the rest of Claudel’s script, and his overall direction is rather sluggish. Most importantly, until those final minutes, we are never given a good reason to sympathize with Juliette other than the simple fact that she’s the main character, and hence onscreen the most. Scott Thomas plays her with the right amount of opacity, but she doesn’t say, do, or feel much of anything — a strange choice for a protagonist.

That being said, the cast does what it can. Scott Thomas is being hailed as a Best Actress Oscar contender, and she is good, but I was far more impressed with Zylberstein and her frazzled husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), who struggle to incorporate Juliette into their already-busy lives, complete with time-draining jobs, their two adopted Vietnamese daughters, and Luc’s mute, live-in father. The casting of the sisters, though, is inspired: they look similar enough to be family, but Léa’s soft features are a stark counterpoint to Juliette’s more weary, prison-hardened face.

One other nagging problem: my French is high-school calibre at best, but the subtitles are severely lacking. When Luc says he doesn’t like Japanese movies, it’s transcribed as “Jap movies,” and even the song lyrics that contain the film’s title come out differently. You expect this sort of thing from live closed captioning, but a prestige film should probably aim a bit higher.