Thérèse
Desqueyroux is not much of a home-maker.
She has servants for that sort of thing.
She is hardly mother of the year either.
She keeps up appearances as a dutiful wife, but she has no love and
little respect for her husband. Yet,
embracing the woman of privilege as a feminist icon or a victim of bourgeoisie society
is a tricky business. The infamous
protagonist of François Mauriac’s most celebrated novel will confound audiences
again in the late Claude Miller’s final film, Thérèse (trailer
here), which
opens this Friday in New York.
At
first, the marriage of Thérèse Larroque and Bernard Desqueyroux makes perfect sense,
because of their pines. It is a way to
combine the wooded estates of the two land-holding families. Despite his wealth, her father is something
of a leftwinger, which may have contributed to her contrary nature. You will not find any of that in the rigidly
conventional Desqueyroux family. Alas,
Bernard is a better hunter than a husband, but his newlywed wife seems even
less interested in their domestic life together.
It
turns out Thérèse’s childhood best friend and now sister-in-law has a more
idealistic and melodramatic approach to love.
She has fallen for Jean Azevedo, the son of a wealthy local Jewish merchant. Obviously, he is quite unacceptable to a
family concerned about upholding their social standing. It falls to the new Madame Desqueyroux to
deal with this unwanted to suitor, who turns out to be considerably less
serious about her sister-in-law than she is about him. However, he awakens yearnings in Thérèse that
only intensify her resentment of her uncouth husband.
A
former protégé of Truffaut, Miller was a master of cinematic ambiguity and
Thérèse Desqueyroux is a fitting character to grace his cinematic au
revoir. When she attempts to murder
Bernard by manipulating his prescribed arsenic drops, her motivations are not
entirely clear. More boorish than brutish
in Miller’s adaptation, he is no longer the abusive savage of Mauriac’s novel,
but a rather sympathetic fool. Clearly,
the constraints of polite society rankle Mme. Desqueyroux, but they will remain
regardless of her husband’s fate. We
have a clear sense the imp of perverse initially spurred her rash behavior, yet
she continues her course of action in a coldly calculated manner.
Audrey
Tautou’s icy detachment perfectly suits this Desqueyroux. She is a tragic enigma, jealously guarding
her conflicting thoughts and emotions from everyone around her. In a bizarre case of dramatic jujitsu, Gilles
Lellouche nearly steals the picture as Bernard Desqueyroux, who does his duty
and keeps a stiff upper lip, because that is what gentlemen do. His final scenes with Tautou have a finely
wrought air of melancholy that come to define the film overall.
