Thérèse Desqueroux (弒夫告白)

Thérèse Desqueroux is a novel written in 1927 by Nobel Prize winning French writer François Mauriac about the acquittal of its heroine for the attempted murder of her husband and her flashback about how it all happened. It was turned into a film in 1962 by a famous French director Franju and was remade last year by Claude Miller. This closing film at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival proved to be his swan song too. 

The film was set in the Landes in 1920s in south western France near to Bordeaux, famous for its red wine. As the film opens we find two lively teenagers  Thérèse Larroque (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) and Anne de la Trave (Matilda Marty-Giraut) playing in the fairy tale like pine forest, blue sea and sunny skies. Anne has a gun and thinks it the most natural thing in the world to shoot at a bird and wring its neck with her bare hands to end its misery. Thérèse, a thinking and reflective girl, was reading a book whilst Anne was simply lying on her back on a boat floating lazily on the water and predicted that her copine would marry her brother. Then the film moves to the marriage of the book reading girl Thérèse Larroque (Audrey Tautou) to her brother Bernard Desqueyroux (Gilles Lellouche), all dressed up in lace, bonnet and finery. Thérèse does not appear particularly happy. She prefers spending the time dancing with a little girl. They had a honeymoon, travelng on the train and Bernard complained of the quality of the wine. Then life returned to normal. Bernard was interested in nothing but the hunt, the pines and their daughter Marie. There does not seem any meaningful love or communication between them. When the two childhood friends wander into their favourite pine forests by the sea, they often see a boat with red sail cruising by with a young man there, whose name they knew but never met, Jean Azevedo( Stanley Weber), the son of another big family of Jewish Portuguese descent owning the huge neighboring pine estate  Since they had nothing better to do, they decided to pay this dashing young man a visit and learned that he had just returned from Paris. Soon Anne fell head over heels in love with him but her family did not approve. In any event, Jean had no intention of marrying Anne, whom he regarded as just his summer vacation fling. When her family found out about it, Anne was forbidden to see him again and she was sent away so that she would have no chance at all of contacting him again. But Thérèse continued writing to him after he returned to Paris. She was always complaining, even before her marriage, that that she had too many ideas in her head, which she hoped might be cured by marriage but this is something which Bernard's mother also did not like, apart from the fact that her family had an even bigger pine estate than Bernard's family. But Thérèse could not understand some of the books Jean told her to read. It was obvious that while she did not have to worry about her material life, her mind and her soul was stifling under the conservative, completely boring atmosphere of her family life and was yearning for a more stimulating kind of life. By accident, she discovered her husband who had been taking a medicine containing arsenic for his occasional heart problem might be fatal if the dosage was increased and she set about systematically increasing the same in the sly. When the poison had its effect, a specialist doctor called in from Bordeaux advised the family in confidence that Thérèse must never be allowed to serve Bernard ever again. Before long, criminal charges were pressed against Thérèse for attempted murder but for the sake of preserving the family name, Bernard testified in her favor, blaming the excess dosage on a formula given to his wife by a stranger which Thérèse met. She was acquitted as expected. But whilst her legal ordeal was over, it was the start of a jail term of another kind imposed on her by Bernard and French values at the time. Although she asked for permission to leave the family, Bernard would have nothing of it. Bernard told her that she would henceforth be confined to a room in his estate, like a piece of furniture which had served its purpose, but will be supplied all she needed to live. However she would not be allowed to go out except to church on Sundays and on important market days, just for the sake of keeping the appearance of family solidarity and their daughter, Marie would be sent to the Franco-Spanish town of Biarritz to be looked after by relatives. When Anne finally got married, everybody was amazed at how distraught Thérèse looked. That was not surprising considering that she survived only on wines and cigarettes. The film ends with Bernard sending Thérèse away to Paris. What would become of her? Would she meet up with Jean? Or some other more interesting people? We don't know. It's anybody's guess.

The acting by Andrey Tautou, the heroine was excellent: she portrayed so well her lack of interest in the banalities of rural life, her boredom, her secret longing for something exciting, her desperate hope for liberation from such a dull life, her quiet determination, beneath her calm exterior to end the life of her authoritarian and insensitive husband and how the accumulation of her petty unhappiness builds up in her until they crystallize into an silent but inveterate hatred and a secret desire for revenge. But circumstances were such that there was simply no way her soul could breathe. She had to drown her unspeakable sorrows in nicotine and alcohol. The photography by Gérard de Battista  was superb. He brought out so well the natural beauty of the region, the play of light and shadows upon the leaves, the bark of the trees, the reflections of the sea and the image of the red sailing boat against the blue sky: it's
ease, its serenity and its promise of liberation epitomizes the impossible dreams of freedom of Thérèse as she looks wistfully as it glides before her eyes in the distance and the ethereal beauty of the quiet piano music in the background  by Chopin and Schumann arranged by  Mathieu Alvado seem to give a voice to the stifled desire of Thérèse for salvation from the indescribable boredom of rural life. A film version of Madame Bovary transposed to 1920s settings of provincial France? Whether or not it may be so described, one walks slowly out from the cinema showing this beautiful but bleak movie with a heart of lead, with perhaps the barest hint of hope.

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