A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 5, 2010.
When the French New Wave master Eric Rohmer died earlier this year, numerous obituary writers felt bound to recycle the famous quip made by Gene Hackman's character in Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975). “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.”
As criticism the comment is worthless, but no-one will deny that Rohmer, like many a French filmmaker, was prepared to take his time. The same is true of Stéphane Brizé, whose romantic drama Mademoiselle Chambon patiently observes a builder named Jean (Vincent Lindon) as he goes about his business – drilling into concrete, replacing a window or putting cladding on a wall.
Based on a novel by Eric Holder, this is a film about process, in particular the slow, painful development of an illicit love affair. Jean is an outwardly simple man who lives contentedly with his younger wife (Aurore Atika) and their little boy (Arthur Le Houérou). He's devoted to them and to his elderly father (Jean-Marc Thibault), now so frail that the nearest he gets to a day out is a trip to the undertaker to choose a coffin.
Still, there are untapped possibilities in Jean. An early scene where he and his wife struggle to help their son with his homework suggests that while neither is highly educated, the husband has more native intelligence (it also confirms that Mademoiselle Chambon is a film which takes a while to make a point). When he's invited to the school to talk to the class about his work, he discovers an eloquence he didn't know he had. A house should last for a lifetime, he explains, if the builder does his job.
The children are duly fascinated, but Jean's solid ordinariness also sparks the interest of their attractive blonde teacher Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain) who flits from one part of France to another and isn't close to her family. Visiting her at home, Jean sees her in turn as something unfamiliar, a representative of high culture. She has art books on her shelves and paintings on her walls; she plays the violin, and lends him CDs.
So the long, awkward dance begins. James Gray's heart-stopping Two Lovers (2008) treated a comparable subject in a style resembling grand opera, but Brizé bets everything on restraint. Most of the action is presented in uninflected medium shots, so every deviation from this scheme stands out. Likewise, music is restricted to dramatic high points, where it acts as a direct carrier of emotion.
Several of these key scenes proceed without words, and Brizé's confidence in his actors is not misplaced. Lindon gives the kind of restrained performance in which every flicker of the eye carries meaning, though beyond the film's first act not much about the character comes as a surprise. Kiberlain is more opaque and in that sense more interesting, with a quirky repertoire of nervous gestures: alone at home, she sits listening to an answering machine message, rubbing her fingers on the kitchen table and looking at her hand as if it belonged to someone else.
Tightly focused on its central triangle, Mademoiselle Chambon is minimal but not especially subtle. The plot is simpler and more obvious than anything you'd find in a Rohmer film, and Brizé is aware we've seen it all before. A great deal is taken for granted about these people, the society they inhabit, and the options they have available. The sexual element of the story is so muted it's hard to know if the bond between Jean and Véronique stems from physical passion or another kind of yearning – but Brize leaves the question open, just as he avoids passing overt judgement on their different ways of life.
The ending is as inevitable as it is sentimental, with more than a hint of austere “good taste”. For French cinema, it seems like business as usual.
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