Critics reviews

The film reaches an extraordinary climax early on when the mother, not yet infirm, vents recriminations about her husband at length to her increasingly exasperated son; this sets the tone for a narrative filled with angry outbursts, uncouth behavior, and surprisingly funny moments.

Time is disarmingly fluid, pockmarked by events; his sequences alternate between desperate, tender and blackly comic modes, with D.P. Nestor Almendros's typically immaculate exposures. The total effect is irreducible, with an impression less of Pialat's desire to purge his own personal demons than to doggedly lay bare their contradictions. The theme of death as nature's great equalizer has rarely been as tonally complex or bracingly observed.

From shot to shot, one can observe a curious struggle going on between Pialat and his celebrated cinematographer, Nestor Almendros: while control over framing seems to be surrendered to the severe parti pris of Pialat, Almendros takes command of the light, producing and intensifying effects of ultra-iridescence, and of an increasingly bleached-out quality that marks the escalating stations to the woman's death — a type of effect we find nowhere else in Pialat's oeuvre.

Maybe a little on-the-nose in its skewed humanism - I'm thinking e.g. of the bickering family glimpsed in the hospital, clearly there to elicit an 'Aren't people funny?' reaction - and certainly very low-key; still a quiet masterwork.

Too recognizable and embarrassing to be strictly sentimental and too inventive and observant to be predictable. his story moves like a string of terse epiphanies, beautifully recorded by Nestor Almendros's camera.