POUR ELLE (ANYTHING FOR HER)- (Fred Cavaye)

-

POUR ELLE raises a somewhat cliched but nonetheless relevant question: does the end justifies the means? Moreover, is breaking the law justified in order to prove your innocence and reclaim your freedom? 

Lisa Aucler (Diane Kruger) is arrested and imprisoned for allegedly killing her boss. Her husband, Julien (Vincent Lindon), a schoolteacher is devastated and shocked. Through all the denial, and the guilt, and the diminishing hope that he has now that they lost in the final appeal, Julien eventually decides to hatch a plan to spring his wife from prison; and that is only logical, for a man who is running out of options will meditate on extreme measures.

He asks for advice from Henri Pasquet (Olivier Marchal), a man who's escaped from jail seven times, and has written a book about it. Pasquet advises him on the basics, saying that every prison has a key, and that Julien needs to find the right one. Of course this is metaphorically speaking, and I'm afraid the Hollywood remake took it literally, which is funny but not entirely inappropriate.

Julien draws a plan on his apartment wall about the escape, and he doesn't tell his wife about it, later on saying to her that had she known, she would have stopped him.

All these, Julien does out of desperation, seeing the grim fate of their young son not having a mother, and after a suicide attempt by Lisa. 

By the film's climax, a thrilling escape ensues as Julien and Lisa and their son Oscar dodge countless police en route to the airport, where they shall go to El Salvador (which I presume not to have extradition laws or else they wouldn't have picked it out of a hat).

Lindon is magnificent; by simply looking at him you'd read his character's suffering. Kruger is equally  noteworthy; her eyes reveal everything.

Going back to the moral questions raised, POUR ELLE merely presents the breaking of the law as a circumstance, an offshoot of murky legal procedures, and partly of bad luck. While it may have condoned (implicitly) taking the law into your own hands, it also just presents the bare truth that people who have everything to lose will risk everything, and that makes them powerful. 

RATING: 4/5


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ANINO SA LIKOD NG BUWAN (Jun Lana, 2015)

-
Image
* English title "Shadow behind the Moon" The best term to describe Jun Lana's latest film would be a cinematic charade- a game of identities, of motives, of suppressed passions, and of uncertainty. Or the film equivalent of a Russian doll, if you will. "Anino sa Likod ng Buwan" only has three characters- husband and wife Nando (Anthony Falcon) and Emma (LJ Reyes) and military man Joel (Luis Alandy). What started as a seemingly routine banter among friends gradually and intensely escalated into an examination of society, where the definition of immorality is blurred during a time of insurgency.  And in fact, the film does discuss the subject of immorality from various paradigms. When does adultery become acceptable, and to whom? Is sexual liberation more heinous than murder? Why is immorality always a double standard? The film plays out the ideas in endless games. Or are they really games at all? Lana could have stopped there, but he didn...
Read more

TUHOG (Jeffrey Jeturian)

-
Image
Film within a film-structured movies are always interesting watch. Not only do they provide a much-needed deconstruction of form and content of cinema itself, but also that much-needed emotional punch a cinephile would surely love.  Like in BAD EDUCATION (Almodovar, 2004), we witness the characters tell the back story via montage, as if we are part of the cast of characters watching an actual movie. The form was successful in evoking pain and regret, and also of empathy. In TUHOG, Jeffrey Jeturian and screenwriter Bing Lao tackles sensational media in the Philippines, especially in cinema. The film opens as a film producer hears a pitch for a possible movie- a story of a grandfather who rapes his own granddaughter.  The director of the film soon after visits the victim of the crime, Floring (Ina Raymundo). Coercing both she and her mother, Perla (Irma Adlawan) to sell them the movie rights to their story, we witness as exploitation cinema unfolds. To think of it, capitaliz...
Read more

BIGKIS (Neal Tan, 2014)

-
Image
As an advocacy film, BIGKIS (INTERTWINED) gets its message across. The state of maternal healthcare in the Philippines is downright depressing, with mothers seated on the floor of public hospitals due to shortage of beds, medical equipment and hospital staff. The baby better be gaping through the birth canal before the mother receives serious medical attention.  Such social issue has been featured countless times in local documentaries and even in a feature film (2011's BAHAY BATA), but BIGKIS pushes the envelope further by bridging a connection between mother and child by means of breastfeeding, and in doing so, promoting breastfeeding in the process.  As a drama, the film tends to squeeze too much tragedy from the downtrodden lives of its characters that a lot of the dialogue feels staged for us to feel sorry for their countless miseries. Mariel (LJ Reyes), a teenage mother deals with an unwanted pregnancy and worse, the abandonment of her baby's father (Pancho ...
Read more