re:mote voices

Title: Nathalie
Cast: Fanny Ardent, Emmanuelle Beart, Gerard Depardieu, Wladimir Yordanoff
Director: Anne Fontaine

This is the latest French film to do the rounds of British cinemas. Reuniting Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart, who were both cast in Ozon’s 8 Women. Nathalie is the latest by director Anne Fontaine, whose previous films include Dry Cleaning and How I Killed My Father.

The cast is rounded out by Gerard Deparieu, who plays Ardants husband. She becomes suspicious of him after he misses the flight that would have got him home in time for his surprise birthday party and she listens to a message from a young woman thanking him for the night before. Ardant confronts Depardieu on the matter and he is very dismissive, which is unsurprisingly less than reassuring.

With this Ardant is fuming on events, when she spots a bar round the corner from where she works. She goes in, and watches men pay to meet women, where she hatches the plan to hire a woman to test her husband. Beart is the woman she chooses, providing her with the pseudonym of Nathalie and information on how to meet her husband. From there Ardant and Beart meet regularly, with Beart dishing the dirt on her increasingly torrid relationship with Depardieu.

Through which a curious relationship is established between the two women, leaving Depardieu on the sidelines of the film really, such that it is the chemistry between the two that really drives the film. Ardant is frustrated and haunted, confused by her motives, at times drawn in and fascinated by these accounts of her husbands actions, then disgusted and offended.

Throughout Beart sizzles, chemically smoking on screen through the intensity of her appearance and how she is made up, bringing her face to life through her smouldering performances – while at the same time she expresses vulnerability as the two become strangely intertwined. A powerful and driven relationship drama, which in real terms perhaps covers small territories, but does so in a striking and remarkable fashion.