Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Infidelity: three variation on a theme, 21 Oct 2006
Nathalie is a 2003 film by Anne Fontaine (Dry Cleaning, My Father and I), starring Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart and Gerard Depardieu. It is a sophisticated attempt to look at the ways people betray each other, based on the murky dynamics of a long term marriage, but I would recommend it only to dedicated fans of the director or stars. Much more successful in my opinion is La Separation, a 1994 film by Christian Vincent. Not that Nathalie is a bad film exactly, but its flaws get in the way.
For one, the script (rewritten by Fontaine) is propelled by a relentless series of coincidences, the kind of thing that gives melodrama a bad name. It all starts when Catherine (Ardant) the fond wife of Bernard (Depardieu), a highly mobile Parisian businessman, finds his mobile phone which he has left lying around the home (that carelessness must have stuffed up his day). Like any good wife would, she goes through and reads his messages. Instead of boring business stuff, she finds a message from someone he has spent the night with who politely thanks him for the sex. Now if husband and wife had been playing mind games with one another we might guess Bernard has left his phone at home on purpose and that the message might or might not be genuine. But they are shown as a long term couple, with their sex life taking a lag, whom are genuinely fond of one another. So its one of those just happened scenarios: phone just happened to be lying around, wife just happened to read the messages, one just happened to be about the husband's infidelity. Catherine is distraught; she drives home from work, stops to think things over, and just happens to find herself parked outside a bar/brothel with a flashy neon sign, where she sees a prostitute say goodbye to a client. She enters, is approached by a prostitute called Marlne (Bart) whom she hires to seduce her husband, under the name of Nathalie. We might imagine all kinds of reasons why, but the film doesn't tell us.
This series of events I call plot devices, unlikely events which are cursorily said to have taken place so that the situation the author is really interested in can be set up. Some will be able to view so far and say, "Ah, the French, so impulsive...". Me, I'm wondering why nobody has left me a message on my phone thanking me for the sex. And I'm damn sure I'll take it with me, in case they do (more useful if you have the thing with you anyway). And are brothels really so up market as all that in France? I got annoyed at what I saw as careless scriptwriting.
Another bother was the acting. I know that Depardieu, Beart and Ardant are good actors, but here they were monotonous. Ardant, betrayed by her husband as she supposes, never tries to find out why. Instead she spends most of the film with a look of suffering on her face. It's well done; you know what she's feeling. Only, it would be a relief if she would get angry, sarcastic, bitter, depressed, self pitying, try to win Bernard back by looking seductive - after an hour of watching her suffer I found myself getting impatient with her. Depardieu plays a self depreciatory (!) man clumsily fond of his wife and pitifully anxious about her. He spends the film that way, and only the fact that we don't see much of him makes him less monotonous than the other actors. Beart has a role with some development, as the bi-sexual hooker who falls for Catherine, strings her along by talking dirty about what she and Bernard get up to, and gets dumped in the end. She gets to show what's going on between her and Catherine while talking about herself and Bernard, which is interesting.
I found myself unsure what the film was focusing on as I watched. Apparently about the marriage of Catherine and Bernard, but is it really about the relationship between Marlne/Nathalie and Catherine? Or was the director/screenwriter trying to give equal billing to her three major stars? There was some rough editing towards the end of the film, with scenes involving Bart which were not long enough to be establishing, the kind of shots that left me wondering, now what was that supposed to be about? I imagined a film about an unfulfilled housewife who turns to a lesbian love affair which had been sanitised by removing the scenes of two women making love and tacking on a conventional ending. The ending came out of nowhere and seemed to have little to do with the body of the film.
Watch the film if delving into relationship politics is your cup of tea. Maybe you can review it here and resolve some of my doubts.
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59 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an exploration into the darker face of intimacy, 26 Jul 2005
I saw this beautiful film a couple of nights ago and found it to be touching and gently haunting. This is an intelligent story about intimacy and the painful yet courageous quest a wife (Ardant) takes into a secret side of her husband's (Depardieu) sexuality. On discovering evidence of her husband's infidelity, she doesn't run, hide or repress but rather engages a painful curiosity to learn why and what he needs from these women. She hires Marlene (Beart) as a co-conspirator, renaming her Nathalie. There is never a suggestion or promise of a menage a trois, rather there is a simmering of sensualities between the women as they explore the shifting sands of truth, fiction and fantasy. This is done with a bewitching grace and allure, sensitively portrayed by both women. This is a compassionate, insightful journey into the heart, soul and spirit of relationships. To view this film through a narrow sexualised lens is to miss the essence of the meaning and message. Both Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart are outstanding, and their dominance in the film reawakened in me the realisation of how dire 'chickflicks' and 'romcoms' truly are. This film has the depth, wisdom and style so typically lacking in most movies. Highly recommended.
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Middle-classes rule, ok?, 3 May 2006
Having just watched 'Nathalie' and read other viewers' comments merely confirms what i've often suspected: i am not of this earth and must have descended from the planet Zog several years ago
Having heard another woman's voicemail on hubby's mobile waxing lyrical over 'the sex' near the beginning of the film Fanny Ardant stumbles into a high-class sex club and hires Emmanuelle Beart/Marlene to become Nathalie and trap hubby into an affair and subsequently relate the intimate goings on in an attempt to discover what he does with 'his women' and why. This takes place and much of the film revolves around the 2 women meeting and Nathalie explicitly dishing the dirt on the nitty-gritties, until .... Well, until almost the end of the film when .....
Millions went to see 'Titanic' knowing the tragic ending but notwithstanding the mainly favourable 'other viewers' comments i doubt many people would feel the same about 'Nathalie'. Why? Because of the ending, which for me essentially invalidates almost the whole of the film in particular the relationship between Nathalie and Fanny Ardant's character, the cheated-on wife. The only demographic i could imagine getting anything positive from this film would be middle-aged, middle-class types, ie like the married couple played by Ardant and Gerard Depardieu - he is some kind of international business type; she a medical professional. Beart plays Nathalie as the younger and lower-middle class would be beautician but who also works in the sex club as an escort
Dishing the dirt on the unexpected twist at the end would be a complete 'spoiler' but i thought it was ridiculous and it made me quite narked. The previous portrayal of Nathalie as being a 'petit-bourgeois', part-time beautician, feeling forced to turn to prostitution and how she manages to handle it all turns round to showing her as a weak, pitiable character. Also the developing relationship between Beart and Ardant, the different ways men and women view sex and intimacy simply vanishes into smoke. The ending made the film a complete swizz, in spite of the presence of 3 megastars with correspondlingly high production values. But then i'm an alien, so there you go
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