Critics reviews

Garrel moves gracefully between their perspectives, encouraging empathy with all three while also noting their limitations. The film is particularly astute when it comes to analyzing the hero's "typically male" equivocation and entitlement; it's also generous enough to let the character realize his errors before they ruin him. This may be Garrel's lightest, most optimistic work, though that's not to say that any of it feels frivolous.

Garrel's film is not a work of nostalgia but a film *about* nostalgia or, rather, the temptation and threat of nostalgia in the face of the endurance of the grand past, which dominates the present day. "In the Shadow of Women" resounds with a quiet astonishment at the epochal clashes and heroic exertions on which today's private struggles depend.

Merhar emotes so little than his bodily tremble during a climactic argument with his wife is seismic. Courau, on the other hand, frowns, dotes, laughs, and seems entirely human. If anything is natural to this pair, and to pairs elsewhere, it's the tendency to imagine that our partners are somehow better than average, gifted and good—nothing short of infallible. Garrel pokes holes in and pokes fun at this pretension, but he has no rancor for his characters. Shorn of illusions, we can lie together.

Shot in beautifully stark black and white by Renato Berta, the film is elegantly executed, but often it's a matter of understated grace notes… It's this detachment and economy that make the film so effective even when its ironies seem obvious or over-stressed.

Given that Garrel and his frequent writing partner Arlette Langmann are behind some of the best films ever made about hopeless relationships, In The Shadow Of Women inevitably comes across as a lesser work by big-time talents… But while this wry take on the attrition warfare of the sexes might not rank with Garrel's best, it still has the marks of his well-developed intimate style, in which scenes are staged as though from memory, and every turn seems obscurely personal.

Filmed in widescreen black-and-white that makes Paris look both decrepit and irresistible, this is a swift tale of what men and women want versus what they settle for. Garrel's ideas on both are pretty old-fashioned. But he wraps it up with a pleasurable O. Henry-like twist, and a moment of what feels suspiciously like true love.

The opening scene magnifies the well-wrought opacity. We see Pierre (Stanislas Merhar) leaning against a wall and nibbling on a baguette... Mainly he stares off into the distance; he's either lost in thought or completely zoned out. And yet despite Pierre's unfocused gaze, ours remains resolutely fixed on the actor playing him: Among their many enchantments, Garrel's films are populated by faces to get lost in, striking visages marked by beautiful planes and angles.

The importance of love, the deceptive lure of political nostalgia, and the problems of two people in a room—what Philippe Garrel's art lacks in variety, it makes up for in crystalline focus… As ever with Garrel, much of the pleasure of the film is in watching the eyes of the actors, trying to decipher who has decided what and when, searching for the telltale signs of someone changing their mind.

Garrel's latest film, In the Shadow of Women, is as characteristically centred on the shifting romantic allegiances of bohemian couples as most of his output, except that he now includes a more critical perspective on hypocritical male behaviour. Here a happily married documentary filmmaker succumbs to a Parisian ménage à trois, but then finds the tables turned on him. The film was represented in Morelia by actress Clotilde Courau, who is quite wonderful as the traduced wife.

Like Eugène Green's superb La Sapienza, Philippe Garrel's latest chamber drama unfolds the crisis of a middle-aged, longstanding couple, played by Stanislas Merhar and Clotilde Courau. With novelistic flair and breathtaking economy, Garrel whisks us through the stations of doubt, infidelity, accusation—and takes us to places his cinema has rarely taken us before.

The reason for such fertility is because the soil of this no (wo)man's land is the principle of drama: one character wants something from another character, who in turn wants something else. This basic set-up creates just enough structural solidity to completely liberate Garrel's camera to follow them and watch their reactions to this minuscule seed of conflict. If we care about them enough (and as a matter of fact, I do), this is all we'll ever need.

The honesty in the writing of 70 preceding, ephemeral minutes, moments that resonate and speak truthfully, amplifies the sweet simplicity of the end, nearly overshadowing obvious gender problems. Still, one can't help but wonder if a pictorialist of Garrel's skill and an observer with his erudition could find something else to look and think about for 70 minutes.