"Margaux Hartmann" -- Movie Review

 

This week at Lincoln Center’s French Film Festival, I streamed the drama, “Margaux Hartmann” (AKA, “The Embrace”).

Synopsis

Can a middle-aged woman rebuild her life after a devastating loss?

Story

Six months ago, Margaux (Emmanuelle Béart) became a widow; after being married for many years, her husband succumbed following a long illness.  Now, she is looking to hit the reset button on her life – and she feels that the best way to do this is to move from her home in Nice to live in her sister’s house in Versailles.  While there, she decides to register for some classes at the local university – partly in hopes to distract her from her grief and partly with the aspiration of finding a new career.  Taking classes with students seeking a Masters degree, she is clearly the oldest one there. 

As far as romance is concerned, Margaux is a bit unsure.  She manages to hit it off with one of her professors, but when their assignation doesn’t exactly go as planned, she immediately transfers out of his class.  Margaux develops friendships with some of her fellow students, but after a while, it becomes clear that because of her age, she does not totally fit in with them.  She’s feeling alone and doesn’t want to go the rest of her life without a man, but she realizes that she needs to find someone who is age-appropriate.  But if she’s only hanging around with people a quarter of a century young than she is, how can that happen?

Eventually, Margaux gets the idea to join a dating service that is specific to her age group.  She then begins a series of adventures, mostly unsatisfactory.  One man she finds attractive agrees to meet with her in a café – only to learn that he is unemployed and has no prospects.  Onward.  Another man she finds from this web site just wants sex – and Margaux, surprisingly, is just fine with that.  So she meets him at his apartment on a few occasions and begins to feel better about things – until she learns that he’s been lying to her and is married with children.  One especially bad experience almost winds up with her being gang-raped, which she manages to escape.  With things turning out this way, can Margaux find happiness in her studies regardless of whether she finds romance?      

Review

“Margaux Hartmann” (or “L'étreinte”, its original French title) is a touching story about how we deal with the aftermath of a great loss – and sometimes, how we don’t deal with that loss.  Margaux seemingly bounces from one experience to another not unlike the ball in a pinball machine – and yet she doesn’t really seem to fully absorb or learn much from any of them.  It seems as though she is merely in survival mode.  One key aspect to this is the fact that she has no children, which would presumably anchor her.  Instead, she is more childlike herself in many ways.  After many years, Margaux is learning how to interact with men after being married so long.

While the episodes of her various adventures are fascinating, where the film ultimately falls apart is in its ending, which is quite a disappointment.  The story never fully resolves and its climax is, well, rather anticlimactic.  Basically, Margaux seems off on yet another adventure without having gained very much in the way of knowledge – especially, self-knowledge.  She still doesn’t know what she wants or how to go about getting this ephemeral objective.  As a result, the totality of the movie is a bit unsatisfying and underwhelming – which is a shame, because everything before it seemed to be really building to something special.   

Following the screening, there was an interview with director Ludovic Bergery and star Emmanuelle Béart.  Bergery said that much of his inspiration came from his childhood, watching movies with his mother and experiencing them through her eyes as a single parent.  Such films as Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”, Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under The Influence” and Antonioni’s “The Eclipse” were included as the inspirations for “Margaux Hartmann”.  Béart said that the character touched some very intimate and private areas of her personality and that she had no memory of her performance during the shoot.