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Trailer for "Gabrielle"

Disembarking from a train and walking through Paris, Jean (Pascal Greggory), the belle époque business magnate in Patrice Cherèau’s Gabrielle, begins to tell us of his achievements and status indicators. Referring to his wife of 10 years, Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert), he sounds a little like a benign version of poet Robert Browning’s brutally cold-blooded duke in My Lost Duchess.

His references to her accompany his almost parodically self-satisfied estimates of his accomplishments and position. He trusts Gabrielle because he knows her thoughts. “I love her as a collector does his most prized possession,” this high-bourgeois paragon tells us as he strides confidently homeward.

Waiting for him at home is a written message which violently brings him up short. “Jean, in an hour I will have left to go to a man.” Stricken, almost literally laid low, he is trying painfully to regroup in mind and body, when he has to process another shock—one that will prove even more difficult to surmount: Gabrielle calmly returns, sans apology or explanation.

When Nora walked out on Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, it was radically conclusive. But it is Gabrielle’s change of mind that is, we gather, the really radical act, and the one which challenges Jean’s unexamined assumptions about himself and society.

Cherèau has used a short story by Joseph Conrad, “The Return,” as the basis for his film, and he must have altered it substantially. I don’t know this work, but reportedly it examines an English husband’s stunned deterioration under similar circumstances, without ever revealing his wife’s mind, or even her name.

Cherèau has tried to establish substantive parity between the two characters in his film, although not in the new relationship that results from Gabrielle’s unconsummated rebellion. It is because of the newly altered and unstable nature of this marriage that the real authority shifts to Gabrielle.

Jean cannot find his way in this strange environment. He is learning how much he depended on the unquestioned esteem of his wife. Abruptly, she seems indifferent to him and his feelings. She readily acknowledges her lack of physical and sentimental love for him. They are engaging in a charged sarabande, but she controls the steps.

Cherèau’s treatment of this material is curiously, wildly and deliberately inconsistent. Even Eric Gautier’s dramatically evocative color cinematography becomes a tool for this willfully erratic approach. Gautier’s impressively skilled deep-focus, wide-screen compositions are interrupted by black-and-white sequences that don’t seem to relate to emotional levels. Titles flash on screen, announcing days, times and even feelings. And the film’s tone suggests vague influences from Sartre, Beckett and Ingmar Bergman, even Strindberg. A surreal note recurs, and the dialogue becomes portentously freighted. (Gabrielle to Jean: “I can see why my sadness intrigues you.”) The movie loses its social awareness and becomes extravagantly emotional.

What do resonate steadily are the two main performances. Huppert conveys a sad, newly cynical wisdom, even if it’s never quite clear what she really wants. And Greggory’s portrait of trauma and despairing decline is engrossing.

If Gabrielle becomes too emptily virtuosic, these two performances give it a more compelling human character.