Ma Saison Preferee. - movie reviews

ANDRE Techine has always struck me as a profoundly spurious director, whose films were vapid and vague, pretentious and hollow, their texture threadbare, their craft rudimentary. Last year, his Wild Reeds won the Oscar for best foreign film, and though it was better than usual for him, it was still far from compelling. The year before (1993), he directed and co-wrote Ma Saison Preferee, and this strikes me as a major achievement. I do wish, however, that the French title had not been kept, giving the film a chichi, art-house aura. But someone must have been afraid (unfoundedly) of creating a confusion with My Favorite Year.

Anyway, Saison is an ambitious attempt to deal with the interlocking problems of three generations within one family, and one outsider who impinges on them. Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) is in her mid forties, a former great beauty still very handsome, and works, like her husband, Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), as a notary public in Toulouse. Her mother, Bertha (Martha Villalonga), is a zesty but stubborn widow of 76, living in a small country house but apparently no longer able to take care of herself. Emilie moves her in with Bruno and herself and their children. Anne (Chiara Mastroianni, and fine) is a first-year law student, who now has her own place; Lucien, an adopted son (Anthony Prada, and not very good), is raw-boned and surly, and has made it to nothing higher than bouncer in a Toulouse bar.

Emilie's somewhat younger brother, Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a brain surgeon who often behaves erratically, has fallen out with Bruno, and so hasn't seen Emilie in years. A very neurotic neurologist, Antoine -- it becomes progressively clearer -- is unconsciously in love with his sister, who has strong, but not incestuous, feelings for him. No wonder Antoine and Bruno don't get along. But now that Bertha is living with them, Emilie needs help with this difficult mother who desperately misses her country house. So she secretly seeks out her brother at his hospital, and asks him to come visit. He does, and brings nothing but trouble.

The very first scenes of Saison attest to its mastery. Emilie is closing down Bertha's house, and systematically locks the shutters on window after window. Through these windows we got glimpses of an idyllic countryside; now, with each newly closed window, the house becomes ominously darker. It is as if Bertha's life were evaporating with the fading light inside, even as, outside, nature is at its most radiant. Mother will have to trade green spaciousness for a black oubliette.

Another early scene shows Bertha at dinner with Emilie and Bruno, and the table talk, sparse and forced, nicely conveys the unease of the spouses, which the old lady's presence exacerbates. Emilie and Bruno, whom we saw as highly efficient in their office, seem no longer quite at home in their home. Finally, Bertha escapes to sit alone outside by the nocturnal swimming pool. Emilie goes after her and watches in horror as her mother chats away with her dead husband and then calmly explains these visitations to her daughter. It is a scene as chilling as it is touching, and it prompts Emilie's surreptitious call on Antoine at the hospital. The seriocomic upheaval his coming to dinner causes leads to Emilie's leaving her husband and setting up on her own. This, in turn, induces Antoine's feelings for her to come tumultuously to the fore, with unsettling results for all.

Counterpointing the vicissitudes of the older generation are those of the younger one. Khadija, nicknamed Radish (Carmen Chaplin), is of North African parentage and works as a secretary to Bruno and Emilie. A slightly dusky stunner, she is a hard worker, but also a sexually free spirit, currently the girlfriend of Lucien, with whom she enjoys terrific sex. But she also needs real loving, which the youth finds hard to admit to. Even mousy Anne has some proto-sexual feelings about Radish, as emerges from a naively sensual striptease the girl performs for the siblings. The theme here is how sexual attachment gradually leads to love, even as the loss of it between Emilie and Bruno nibbles away at their marriage. Unfortunately, Techine is not quite successful at integrating these opposite movements into a convincing interplay; indeed, we are never clear about why Lucien was adopted in the first place, and why, given a solid middle-class upbringing, he should still feel and behave like a lower-class interloper.

Anne's anxiety as a daughter torn between her father, with whom she sides, and her mother, whom she misses, is presumably intensified by her lack of appeal to men; though this remains a mere hint, it is nicely suggested. Lucien's emotional strangulation is likewise effectively conveyed. And there are fascinating sidelights on neurology, as exemplified by Antoine's intervention in his mother's deteriorating mental processes. We experience the striking contrast between his professional proficiency and private awkwardness.

Even though the film works well enough as a whole, its chief strength is in the individual scenes, some of them seemingly quite ordinary. Thus a thoughtful talk between Antoine and Emilie about their growing pains as children and escalating problems as adults takes place at a roadside restaurant in what would be a charmingly rustic setting were it not for the cars whooshing by on the highway just behind them. These cars function as a cacophonous accompaniment to an apparently harmonious duet that, nevertheless, cannot end well.