This beautifully photographed movie earned Juliette Binoche Best Actress at Cannes for her performance as a prickly French single mother who meets an English author at his book reading near her home in Italy and then spends the day in Tuscany with him. With dialogue in French, Italian, and English, it presents a mystery: have they just met or have they been together a long time?
In a weekend when we also saw All Good Things and Casino Jack (I'll write the latter eventually, I promise), we felt like psychology majors, studying mad protagonists, including Binoche's (I wrote about her in Paris and Summer Hours) Elle, who one minute is introducing herself to the author James Miller, the next flirting, and the next bickering about "old" resentments. Opera baritone William Shimmell (his feature film debut) plays Miller, the only character who has a name (elle is French for "she"), and his mixed reactions cause us to wonder whether Elle is, in fact, crazy. Young Adrian Moore is quite delightful in his few scenes as Elle's teenage smart aleck son.
Iranian writer/director Abbas Kiarostami has made a long list of award-winning movies, but I don't think I've seen any of them. Oh well, next time I will know him. This is his first feature made outside of his native country. Luca Bigazzi is the cinematographer responsible for the lovely images of people, places (shot in Lucignano and Arezzo, southeast of Florence), and things. I wish I could remember the music, but no composer is credited on imdb, nor can I find a list of songs. Anyway, this is an enigma wrapped in a riddle, best seen on a big screen. Rottentomatoes' audiences were lukewarm on this one, with 67%, but their critics loved it, giving it 87%. I had a very subjective reaction to it, becoming irritated by the bickering, and Jack didn't love it either, so we were in the same camp with the audiences this time. So I can't advise you one way or the other.
In 2016, five years after posting this, I heard from someone who works for a site called artsy.net. He asked me to post a link to this director's page on that site. Apparently Kiarostami is an accomplished still photographer as well. So here is the site: https://www.artsy.net/artist/abbas-kiarostami. Enjoy!
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