La jalousie

A seventy-seven minute film should not take three hours to watch. Thanks to the unbothered tone, however, and a narrative that amounts to "Relationships: Those that work, and those that don't," or maybe "Romantic relationships and the behavior that people within them exhibit," I fell asleep multiple times while watching. Enchanting and actively engaging this is not. That's not to say that 'La jalousie,' or 'Jealousy,' is "bad," and I've seen plenty of other films that adopted a similar low-key tenor and made fantastic use of it. Sometimes I prefer such works to those that pointedly dress up their storytelling. The ideas here bear suitable potential, and in fact the plot boils down to recognizable fare for many romantic dramas. The problem is that this consciously flattens that drama, and the movie never does anything more than lazily float down the river of its runtime. It might wave at we spectators in the audience as it bobs past, but mostly it feels like it's napping, too.

I don't specifically fault anyone involved. The cast and crew turned in fine work, the writing is fine, and though the direction might be most culpable there's nothing particularly wrong about what Philippe Garrel is doing here. I'm personally inclined to think that Willy Kurant's black and white cinematography is the most outwardly commendable aspect of the whole feature, lending the look and feel of a title that might have been made fifty years before. I don't altogether dislike this - I just don't think it's interesting enough, or unique enough, to be noteworthy, and there's nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere. I wish nothing but the best for all who participated in its creation, yet as far as I'm concerned 'La jalousie' is a forgettable blip for which saying "take it or leave it" is demonstrating effort disproportionate to the value the picture can claim.

People who are used to Oscar-type films will probably not like Garrel's work. If you, like me prefer the kind of films that feature at the Cannes film festival, I give this a high recommend.

Garrel's films are somewhat spare, and have excellent naturalistic acting. the cinematography is sublimely beautiful B&W. His film's endings are almost always downbeat, which alone might exclude many viewers from enjoying his films.

Film opinions are always subjective. You can always look at my to 1000 list (by clicking on my username) to see if our tastes overlap...

JEALOUSY: FATE OF A MAN

BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India, JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India

44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India

The specialist master Philippe Garrel is a leader of serious and sociological cinema where issues are raised for debates. His new film JEALOUSY, shown at IFFI, Goa, India 2013, highlights the exhilaration of love, the exaltation of art—funny pillars of the modern French psyche it is claimed. "Jealousy" is a cruel, ironic palimpsest that informs of Paris onto passions of past decades—and does so with a pat black-and-white palette by the seventy-nine-year-old cinematographer Willy Kurant ,the early highlight of whose remarkable career was the romantically threadbare, black-and-white Paris in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film "Masculine Feminine". The theme marked by clinical interpretation, puts on emphasis of choices that contemporary life renders all the more misunderstood psychic turmoil revealing the city's topical losses, as well as its gains. Interestingly Garrel plays Louis, a struggling actor with a role in a start-up stage production that he enjoys but that barely pays. He leaves his girlfriend, the pale office worker Clothilde, in a primal scene that Charlotte, their young daughter, sees through a keyhole. In a plain twist the film shows Louis's new lover is another actress, the impulsive and frogged voiced Claudia . The director films the early days of their new romance with a thrilling, manic vigor; one long tracking shot of a mercurial simplicity, showing Louis and Claudia striding through the street as the busy backdrop seems to sweep past them and captures a secret moment of paradise that tends never to end. The tight framing of that shot also filters out the rest of the world, which, nonetheless, quickly impinges on their idyll. The new couple live in a cramped garret in a raw corner of town. Despite leaving Charlotte's mother, Louis continues to see his daughter often and happily, even pinch-babysitting in Clothilde's apartment when she comes home late from work—but he hardly contributes to her upkeep, since he himself is barely getting by. Garrel told me that, in 1968, it was possible to survive in Paris on three or four francs a day. In "Regular Lovers," he suggested the emotional toll of the self-inflicted bohemian poverty of that era, and in "Jealousy" he returns to the subject with an even more blunt and bitter self-deprecation. A strange thing happens in the movie: the action seems to spiral downward, to settle toward a sodden stasis. As I watched the film, I sensed that the drama was losing energy; it turned out that the characters were losing energy, that the lack of money became a lack of energy. "You don't love someone in a void," Claudia says, but that's exactly what the couple have created around them—and, especially, what Louis imposes on her. In one painfully telling scene, Claudia arrives home and happily tells Louis that she has been offered a part-time job as a clerk in an archive. Louis tells her that she shouldn't abandon her acting career so soon, even though she hasn't been cast in a role in six years. He sees her choice as one between money and art; she longs for a more comfortable apartment and a less constrained daily life, but it is, above all, a dynamic principle that she lacks—the daily round of interactions and discussions, of busy-ness that arises in business. And, after following a downward slope in the movie's first half, Claudia rises again in the second as, despite Louis's injunction, she finds a way to reconnect with life. In short "Jealousy" is a story of generations. Olga Milshtein, who plays Charlotte, is an extraordinarily poised and dialectical child actor, and her scenes with Louis are filmed with a great grace of tenderness. We are given to understand Charlotte's father is an artist and the child is as conservative as any—dependent on order and stability, and aspiring to the normative and unified family that she lost—and, paradoxically. Garrel is a filmmaker of generations. It narrates about a 30 year old man's tragic life being betrayed by his present lover who means a lot to him. His earlier has left him and in his trial to face life with a chin high up. As a theatre actor the protagonist struggles hard his entire life to stand up to cruel situation and being frustrated tries a suicide. It fails him and he continues to change his pattern of life to a better scape of living. But is it a dream or a reality to be realized with gusto. Garrel's desire to spruce up the actor's life by giving the benefit of doubt stays. But the film end in a hospital with his sister by the cator's side. Thus the film is nothing but a fate of a man, an actor that stands smothered by social circumstance. A good film and won crowds at IFFI, Goa, India.

"I love secrets"

-Claudia

I was semi-interested in seeing this film, i had herd a couple of things about it but really i knew very little about the movie. I remember it premiering at Venice where it didn't make much of a splash and it continued throughout Europe in many more festivals and it's now been released in the U.S. The picture is directed by a highly regarded French director whose work was basically unknown to me so i thought i would give this film a chance and who knows maybe i would be surprised.

Jealousy is Directed by Philippe Garrel and it stars Louis Garrel, Anna Mouglalis, Emanuela Ponzano and Arthur Igual. "A 30-year-old man lives with a woman in a small, furnished rental. He has a daughter by another woman - a woman he abandoned. A theatre actor and very poor, he is madly in love with this other woman. She was once a rising star, but all offers of work have dried up. The man does everything he can to get her a role, but nothing works out. The woman cheats on him. And then she leaves him. The man tries to kill himself, but fails. His sister visits him in hospital. She's all he has left - his sister and the theatre."

I went into the this picture without much of an expectation, i had heard that this was not the directors best work but i was still hopeful that this would be a pleasant experience, but unfortunately i can not say that. This was a little bit of a painful watch to say the truth, the movie does have it's moments but overall this picture did very little for me.

I mean i should also remind that this film has a mere run-time over 72 minutes, this is a very quick little run but unfortunately it does not feel that way. I was pretty much bored the whole way through and this felt like a long, tiresome watch. The plot is pretty simple and so are it's characters and to say the truth that's one of the problems. The film doesn't really have much of a plot, the picture is composed by episodes that have the same characters and are all within a context but they don't come together as fluently as they should, narrative wise there's a sense that the film is stuck on the same page.

I thought the story was presented in a too episodically but i think the characters themselves are not exactly exciting either. We know very little about these people, we understand little of the motivations and they never manage to pop out of the screen. They feel vague and unmemorable and i never cared for them.

I will say that the the cinematography is pretty good, it's done by legend Willy Kurant. The tone of the black and white are quite beautiful and it does capture the depressing mood of the characters. The highlights of the film are the scenes where Louis is with his daughter, those are the only joyful moments in the whole movie, where the acting and the characters fells genuine and for once i found myself attached to the screen in any way.

Jealousy addresses it's theme and plot with a surprisingly lack of melodrama which is good, but only to an extent since there is a sense of lack of emotion, the acting feels rigid, the story itself is very bleak, slow and joyless. I cared little for what i saw, i for the most part was bored, i could barely make through the 70 minutes.

Rating:C-