Valley Of Love (15)

ALONG with grief, suicide can elicit confusion, bafflement, guilt and anger in a person’s friends and relatives. And all these feelings come into play in typically French fashion –intelligent, unsentimental, without histrionics – in the drama Valley Of Love.

There’s also a mystical element to the film, in part derived from its setting in America’s Death Valley, whose scorching environment might draw the deepest emotions to the surface, before giving them a certain twist. And it features two of the greats of French cinema, Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu, reunited for the first time in 35 years. The result is rich in resonance and ripe for interpretation.

The writer and director Guillaume Nicloux mischievously adds to that resonance by having his stars play fictional actors, named Isabelle and Gerard. These two were once a couple, long ago, and had a child, Michael, who they seem to have failed miserably. They are now reunited in grief, brought together six months after their son’s sudden and unexplained suicide.

Isabelle hadn’t seen her son for years; Gerard once or twice. But before he died, he sent each a letter, with the same instruction – to come to the desert and visit the seven Death Valley landmarks, together. At some point on this itinerary, Michael writes, the three of them will meet again.

This seems to be an estranged son’s last, deranged attempt at connection. But Isabelle feels that something spiritual, or even supernatural, is in the offing. Gerard, overweight and particularly vulnerable to the intense heat of the desert, is simply angry at what he sees as a “kind of punishment” for their errant parenting. At best, he regards it as a chance to “put behind us” their feelings of guilt and grief.

And so they convene at a sprawling motel appropriately named Furnace Creek, from where they embark on a road trip into the desert; whatever they will ultimately find out there – understanding, salvation, or something else entirely – what is quickly apparent is that they are rediscovering each other.

Depardieu and Huppert made two films together early in their careers, the last the wonderful Loulou in 1980. They were young and both unconventionally beautiful then; their looks remain, her elfin, hippy chic merely lined by age, his Picasso-like mass of nose and chin still mesmerising, yet accompanied by an outlandish girth, which the actor has been wielding as a dramatic tool for some time now.

“I got fat,” Gerard says, feeling he must acknowledge the obvious. “Whatever makes you happy,” she casually replies. The actors may not have been romantically involved for real, but what they convey here is a sense of shared history, mutual understanding and a complicity, which is invaluable to the story.

Other than that, the fact that the characters are actors is irrelevant, save for offering easy jokes as Gerard teases an American autograph-hunter by signing himself “Bob De Niro”, and the inference that, as they farmed Michael off to boarding school, they allowed their careers to usurp their child. Their new families also seem to be incidental to their lives.

While not particularly sympathetic, they’re somehow likeable in their confusion and pain, which each represents differently – she in self-flagellating tears, his more subtly intimated through the gruff scepticism and complaints.

The film asks two questions. The most obvious, elicited by the suicide: how well do parents really know their children? The other: what is a parent’s obligation? “Of course it’s our fault,” says Gerard. “We had him. It’s our responsibility.” It’s this ineluctable weight that they carry with them into the desert.

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