Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard)

 

SEVENTEEN TIMES CÉCILE CASSARD (Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard)   A 

France  (105 mi)  2002  d:  Christophe Honoré

An exquisitely directed, well-written, beautifully edited film where Béatrice Dalle literally carries this film, as she is utterly fabulous, rivaling even the great Isabelle Huppert's THE PIANO TEACHER (2001) performance this year, and while saying little, this is one of the more strangely sensuous performances seen in years, arguably better than Samantha Morton's performance in expressing the exact same kind of morbid introspection from Lynne Ramsay’s MORVERN CALLAR (2002), another film about grief and loss that veers into an eccentric road movie.  Well so does this one, intensely expressed through a kind of experimental, non-narrative journey, where there are no mind-altering hallucinogenics, instead it's all based on a collapsing interior world, where the common theme seems to be disassociation, displacement, disorientation, someone who has lost touch with the world.

Reminiscent of several terrific films, Fassbinder's QUERELLE (1982) first and foremost comes to mind, as a kind of rampant homoerotic underbelly seems to thrive in this small seaside town, yet there is a woman in the middle of it, very much in the vein of Jeanne Moreau's role, and this film has one of the most elegant, sensual scenes of the year, starting with some unusually dark and exotic music, every move is slow, calculated, and perfectly choreographed, where Dalle is slow dancing with one shirtless man (Romain Duris) while another man smoking silently looks on, then the other man very sensuously cuts in and the two men dance together, 17 fois Cécile Cassard - Christophe Honoré Bande ... - YouTube (2:14), while she, in her red dress, can be seen in the mirror looking on.  Thematically, the film resembles Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS:  BLUE (1993), especially the extent of one’s withdrawal from the world after the death of a spouse, where rather than living in solitude, as she intends, people begin to intrude in her life, also Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), where modern technology leads to a kind of shock to the nervous system, where humans are completely alienated from one another, even during sex, trapped in an interior psychological wasteland.

This is a carefully crafted look at a more mature women who is looking to find her way back, not gracefully, as she is utterly fearless in making choices that, in some sense, none among us has ever contemplated, where the originality factor is the uniqueness of the experience.  Unable to function after the death of her husband in a car crash, Honoré offers an astonishing portrait of unending despair strewn out over just 17 fragmented scenes, where the mood is dead serious, pensive, yet odd, and always emotionally challenging, revealing a rarely expressed depth of emotion, initially someone on the edge of suicidal contemplation, then becoming lost in a kind of fevered sensuality, stuck in an aftermath state of oblivion that somehow leads to personal renewal, where she’s forced to literally rediscover herself.  Beautifully expressed through the offbeat photography by Remy Chevrin, a tone poem where every image is a work of art, complimented by original music written by Alex Beaupain, the heavy metal rock interludes come out of nowhere and are emotionally bone jarring, and yes, they absolutely rock us from any sense of calm or complacency and add to the continuously disorienting mood in what is otherwise a wordlessly quiet and spacious film.