Critics reviews

The fists of Louis Garrel kept onscreen for the entire interval between standing up and sitting down again, the countless thresholds that linger after the characters have long passed, the daughter that survives as a fruit of a marriage that no longer exists… all these elements hide not only the evidence of a surprisingly bressonian Garrel, but also the traces of a world whose internal disjointed nature is the cause of its very ruin.

...Louis [the character] obviously has a type, yet the movie suggests that he can never be happy in a domestic situation for long because he hasn't yet gotten over being abandoned by his father. (Garrel himself has been in several long-term relationships, most notably with the pop singer Nico and with actress Brigitte Sy, Louis Garrel's mother.) On a related note, the movie makes clear why the little girl would bond so quickly with Claudia—the new woman is just like her mother.

The film's 77 minutes, shot in an autumnal, woolly, Bergmanesque black-and-white, watch them do nothing much — alone together, or her with friends, or him with his young daughter and other actors. There's a casualness at work here that's absorbing because Garrel doesn't make a moment mean more than it ought to.

In the category of contemporary directors whose work I reflexively anticipate and enjoy to the extent where it's almost unfair, there are few who make me question my own responses as much as Garrel... I always end up chuckling my way through his recent work, but I suspect a more serious reaction is expected, and fear I'm being disrespectful to someone whose work I love. This perceptual problem is embodied by his son Louis, Philippe's reliably inexpressive leading man since 2005's Regular Lovers.

..."Jealousy" is the kind of slight, academic, self-satisfied exercise that preaches only to the converted... Garrel may not tread a single inch of new territory thematically, but the film's staging (most scenes are done in a single take), its descriptions of its characters' behavior and the actors' performance are all accomplished with a steady, understated expertise. And yet some of the old phoniness partly overthrown by the New Wave remains...

What it resembles, in the end, is life as remembered from the afterlife. In Garrel's cosmology, the great beyond is the medium of film; it's pretty there and no one ever ages, but it's also too removed from the world of the living to completely understand them. Jealousy—arguably the slightest film Garrel has produced since the 1980s—may not add up to a whole lot, but its sense of life and the medium is, as always, substantial and accomplished.

With nary a special effect in sight, the film revels in ravishing black-and-white 'Scope, the stunning limpidity of which makes one wonder why it's been used so infrequently since the heyday of Kurosawa and Imamura. Given the simplicity of the story and settings of Jealousy, the wide screen might seem a luxury, but the format is friendly to the film's semi-improvisational style and allows the emotional distances between characters to echo throughout each frame.

Garrel père shot the film in 35mm black and white, working with legendary cinematographer Willy Kurant (Masculin Féminin, Under The Sun Of Satan, Pootie Tang), and the silvery shimmer lends a nostalgic flavor to this nominally contemporary tale. There isn't much to it, really, but a little truth and loveliness is always welcome.

It's a case where Louis Garrel's moody act (his hair ever ready for a David Levine illustration) is satisfyingly flattened out by the swift cuts of Mouglalis's line delivery. So too does Garrel père etch his 76-minute film's bare assortment of scenes with efficiency and with what Eric Hynes aptly calls "intergenerational empathy" (part of a "legacy of longing").

Beautiful to look at, thanks to Paris, film stock and the cinematographer Willy Kurant ("Masculine Feminine"), "Jealousy" has a quiet melancholy that's very pleasing... The director eschews humor in favor of flat declarations: "I love you . . . definitively." It's an exquisite glimpse of Parisian coupling and uncoupling, but it's strangely lacking in real conflict.

The present folds into the past so subtly and neatly we simply don't take account. One must be careful because a moment is so immediately a memory that things too easily get away. Garrel captures escaping moments, memories as soon as they register. Both Boyhood and Jealousy see life as precious, but Garrel locates this preciousness in the smallest gestures and feelings—glimpses of life being lived, felt, and becoming the past.

Information and exposition is continually elided, just as individual scenes forgo demarcation, creating internal ellipses which gather an effortless rhythm from moment to moment. Indeed, Jealousy is built on such fleeting instances; romance is born in a glance and relinquished with an edit, as Garrel's expert imagining of the temporal boundaries linking each of these relationships fosters a kind of time-lapse visual diary of intertwined fates.