A Monkey on My Shoulder ( A coeur ouvert)(開心見誠)

My fourth film at the FFF is another modern day French fairy tale about love.The French title "A coeur ouvert" of the film "A Monkey on my shoulder", literally meaning "To the open heart", is a double entendre. It may refer to the career of a lovebird husband and wife heart surgeon team Javier (Edgar Ramirez) (winner of the Best Male Newcomer César 2011 for Carlos) and Mila (Juliette Binoche) (Best Actress at Cannes in 2010 for Certified Copy ) or to what is going on inside their hearts. It's a film co-written by director Marion Laine with Anne le Ny about the what a pregnancy may do to their relationship.

Mila is modern day surgeon by day and an excitement loving woman hungry for all the sensual fun that contemporary urban life has to offer. The minute they're off work, she would don her helmet and leather jacket, kick start her motorbike and take her husband Javier, a brilliant surgeon who set up the original heart-transplant unit of their hospital, to a bar or night club to drink and dance and then return home to make passionate love with perfect abandon. At the time that film opens, they are already married 10 years and she is still madly in love with Javier. Then in the middle of an operation which started without Javier because he was late, Javier felt that he was unnecessary because her wife appeared to be able do everything without his "assistance" and abruptly left. His wife had to call for urgent extra assistance. Shortly thereafter, Javier received notice that he would no longer be the head of the heart transplant team and he was asked to take up teaching instead. There had been lots of complaints from his colleagues about his ability to be punctual and to have a steady hand at operation because of his alcohol problem. He would have none of it. To add to his problem, his wife was found to be pregnant. Mila told him that she wanted an abortion because she did not want a baby to disrupt their carnal pleasures. But he said he wanted the child which he intended should be born somewhere in Spanish speaking South America, he himself being of Spanish origin. Mila agreed. He was surprised. She said for him, she was prepared to give up everything. He continued to drink and when drunk got into a quarrel with Mila as a result of which he caused Mila to fall. She was rushed to hospital. Fortunately, the baby was safe but Mila was told that she could not leave the country in her condition for another 5 months. So she told Javier, who wanted to leave the country immediately and had already bought the tickets. Upon hearing that, he tore up the plane tickets. When he learned that the new head of the heart transplant unit was his wife, he was stark raving mad that Mila should not have told him anything about it and accused her of conspiring with the others to keep him in the dark about the intended change of personnel. Mila told him that he must get to grips with the source of his problem, his alcoholism but he would not.

In the meantime, he resigned from his post despite the entreaties by the head of the hospital to stay and continue to work in some other capacity. He was taken back after Mila spoke to the head of the hospital Mannon but continued to fail to show up at the appointed time for surgery following which he discovered to his anger, that he was being assigned to do less and less important surgeries. Upon seeing his name on the roster board showing that he had been assigned to do a very minor surgery, he could take it no more and stormed out of the hospital, went on another alcoholic binge and then to his favourite haunt, the zoo, to watch the chimpansees.  After he returned, Mila told him that he must make a real effort to kick off the habit. “We eat too much, drink too much, screw too much and don’t get enough exercise,” said Mila. He would have none of it and the situation got from bad to worse and household objects started flying around during quarrels. But Mila would not give up until one day, when she returned home, she found that some of the walls including that separating the sitting room from the toilet was in shambles and that Javier was right in the process of knocking down other parts of the partition wall of the house with a sledge hammer! He complained in his alcoholic daze that  since her pregnancy, all he heard her talking about was the baby and in addition, accused his wife of having an affair with another surgeon at the hospital. Upon hearing that, she said that she could not take it any more and in her anger, said she did not care any more and that he could choose to go the way his father and his mother did, destroyed by alcoholism. In his rage, he grabbed her. She struggled free and threw him off. Javier left, slamming the door behind him. After a while, Mila felt worried and went out in the night to all the places she thought he might be, bars, restaurants etc,looking for him. Finally, she arrived at the zoo whom she knew her husband would love to go. She was right. He was there but unbeknownst to her, was inside the cage of the chimpanzees, sleeping on the floor out of exhaustion. She too collapsed from exhaustion because of all the walking and anxious rushing about and sustained a head injury during the fall .She reminisced in her coma the good times she had with him in the lake boating in midnight after sneaking in after closing hours some time ago,  Someone found her. She was rushed to hospital again. They did a caesarian. They saved the baby girl at 5.5 pounds. During her coma, she dreamt of the other happy times they had .She dreamt that she was alone in a boat, drifting down a rapids and then fell off the edge of a giant waterfall, plunging hundreds of feet down and then whilst sitting calmly on a meadow and then on another boat how she could see how in the distance Javier was holding their darling daughter above his head under the colorful rainbow formed by the sprays of the waterfall of the Orinoco River in Venuzuela where they were supposed to go after 5 months. Some one found Javier and informed him of his wife's condition. He entered the room where she was recovering on a bed after the surgery, tied his belt around the door knob to prevent people from getting in, went to her bed, and then held and whispered into her ears, how much he loved her and put his legs between hers. Then we hear Mila's voice off, apparently when she regained consciousness from the coma, telling Javier that she was sure that sooner or later he would  come back and hold her again and suddenly, realzing that the weight was off her abdomen, asking where her baby was.  The film ends. 

It's a simple melodramatic tale about how alcoholism, combined with injury to a man's ego from loss of status and jealousy could destroy a marathon adolescent- like love relationship and how in the end, love is stronger than anything else and may yet save a relationship tested to its limits, based on the novel l’Orénoque by Matthias Enard. Juliette Binoche put in a credible performance as a love-crazed wife. So did Ramiriez as the lustful, spontaneous, playful and ape like surgeon  ruined by a fatal weakness: alcohol. The music by Bruno Coulais, who also did the music for The Field of Enchantment in my earlier blog, was excellent as usual but I'm afraid to say, not as good as in the earlier film.  A modern day French melodrama with some moving moments.