Kritiken

Nicloux's smartest decision is the casting of Huppert alongside Depardieu as grieving divorced parents summoned to Death Valley by the ghost of their departed son, and the act alone of watching them go through the gauntlet together summons up their accumulated screen histories alongside one another in ways that deepen their already superlative turns. The film's surreal premise only builds toward stranger and spookier territory, and ultimately a transcendent climax that just about knocked me out.

There are mildly intriguing layers to the material, particularly if you are at all au fait with the real lives of the two leads. But the whimsical overlaps between real and fictionalised personas add little but the odd insider titter, the clever casting doing little to amplify the story of a couple going to insane ends to mourn their son.

It's a little jarring to see these two one-time emblems of rebellion in the roles of aged parents who just didn't understand, but of course that's part of the film's point. Youthful impudence is a great and sometimes useful thing, but it is, alas, practically unsustainable... These characters, and the actors playing them, get it very, very well. It's in the way that Depardieu and Huppert can convey an aspect of phenomenological rue that gives this sometimes muddled movie its ultimate value.

In French writer-director Guillaume Nicloux's strange and moving new film, Valley of Love, the great basin serves not as a hostile element but as a monument to the sorrows of whoever's beholding it. In this meditation on love and loss, it's as if the crags and dunes of Death Valley have been purified by the heat into a form of magnificent sadness.

This material is often quite funny, but it clashes unproductively with Isabelle's grief, and her bursts of anger at Gérard for not taking their son's promise of temporary resurrection seriously. There's almost a gender-reversed Mulder-Scully dynamic between the two leads, though Nicloux has zero interest in revealing what truth is out there amidst the majestic desolation. (The finale/denouement is a big ol' tease.)

As Isabelle and Gérard walk and talk, occasionally popping into the pool, a restaurant or their respective rooms, the movie opens up an attractive, at times seductive intimacy... Ms. Huppert and Mr. Depardieu are such tremendous, epochal screen presences and performers that it doesn't much matter that they've convened for a character who turns out to be completely incidental. This movie is finally only about Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, and that's enough.

Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines. (Another obstacle: For all her gifts, Huppert is a terrible onscreen crier.) ...Valley of Love reveals the indifference of two eminences: both to the material they've been given and to each other.

...No level of poesis or literary dexterity, both of which the letters lack, could save the film from this faux pas. Suddenly, Michael is no longer a teasing angel, allegorical device, or Guibert-like provocateur, but a prankster with pedestrian writing skills. The film only recovers from this blunder when it surrenders again to restraint in one of the most arresting sequences in contemporary cinema.

That Nicloux is willing to swerve from a finely-shaped reunion drama into a scene antagonizing the kind of films it stands against suggests its constantly amorphous nature, which I found invigorating.

For me, Guillaume Nicloux's Valley of Love was the best French film, but it was perceived as an absolute outsider here, maybe because it belongs to a more art film-oriented, self-reflexive, minimalist tradition.

It's a harmless if slightly far-fetched afterlife conceit, and barrels forward on the momentum of monstrous Gerard and petite Isabelle making such an unlikely rematched couple. The acting is fine, especially from Huppert, but the vastness of the location is too flattened out to be more than a backdrop, and an air of pointlessness hangs over the whole production.

Huppert and Depardieu last shared the screen in the powerful erotic drama "Loulou" in 1980 (directed by Maurice Pialat, whose widow, Sylvie, is a producer on "Valley"), while Depardieu himself lost a son, actor Guillaume, in 2008 — context that gives "Valley" a handful of oddly touching moments, though not enough to prevent it from ultimately seeming like a pretentious French film buff's companion piece to Gus Van Sant's roundly dismissed "Sea of Trees.