Cet Amour-La (2002)
Runtime: 1 hr 38 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Aymeric Demarigny, Christiane Rorato, Sophie Mileron, Justine Levy
DVD Info
Release:
Nov 15, 2005
DVD Features:
- Region (unknown)
- Full Frame
Additional Releaese Material:
- Making of Cet Amour La
- Theatrical Trailer
Interactive Features:
- Scene Access
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
It's a tender, sympathetic film from a gifted writer-director, Algerian-born Josee Dayan, who obviously adores Moreau, Duras and literature.
Moreau's small but telling glances are all the movie has to reveal Duras' loneliness and yearning for a last embrace, but at times it's almost enough.
Like its subject, Cet Amour-La has a knack for making you focus on the beauty beneath the imperfections.
It is a great story, but it hasn't been translated to the screen.
Dayan never makes the love story accessible to us, never makes us understand what there is between this couple.
Moreau brings to the role the sophistication, creative passion and weary wariness only a fellow great artist could evoke with such effortless conviction.
Cet Amour-Là founders on the difficulty that faces all movies about artists -- how to contextualize the work into the life without putting the audience to sleep.
[Moreau] now in her mid-70s, takes charge of her scenes with an iron-fisted authority that refuses to acknowledge the inert movie around her.
A film that revels in the insights of Duras' writing and the wisdom of Ms. Moreau's ripe experience as an actress -- a perfectly observed hommage to two extraordinary women of distinction, alone but never lonely.
Ms. Dayan is to be commended for breathing even often-painful life into a relationship that was largely sealed off from the world outside.
Overwhelmed by maudlin, somewhat empty musings on Art and Life.
Patient viewers will be rewarded with a satisfying film that brings the ideas as well as the passions of the renowned French author to life.
Moreau ... who knew Duras quite well and starred in no fewer than four films based on the writer's work, perfectly embodies her friend, and is thoroughly magnificent.
The famously difficult Duras comes off as a grumpy but lovable eccentric, a sort of Auntie Mame with bad moods, who encourages the puppyish Yann to find his own voice and follow his dream.
Dayan's film is a bizarrely attenuated experience, neglecting dramatic substance and context ... in favor of swooning hagiography.
Moreau presents a magnificently ravaged lioness in winter, feisty as all hell, with occasional tenderness peeking through like rays through storm clouds.


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