The Parisian publisher Joan (Isabelle Huppert) her car through the rainy night. She then looks up and speaks directly to the viewer through the windshield, with precise instructions on how to pronounce her Irish name correctly. Definitely not like John Wayne, and certainly not like the French Jeanne. However, the directness of her gaze is deceptive. She suggests that Joan can be trusted, but it soon turns out that she is an unreliable narrator, in whose perception the real present, the remembered past and pipe dream merge into one another. A puzzle that the viewer puts together like a detective. She tells of her parents, the Irish father and the French mother, who once met at a ship’s christening in a French port. She conjures up the image of that scene, so strong in her mind that she is certain she actually saw it: “I always thought there was physical evidence of that moment,” she says, “I was sure to have seen a photo of it. How absurd!” And: “This is the stuff memories are made of”. This also applies to the illusions of cinema.
A pickpocket and sex with an octopus
One could read this scene as a warning not to trust the narrations of this film. But also as an invitation to indulge in the images that make every memory appear very immediate and present, whether it jumps to the seventies, eighties, nineties or to the present, in which Joan has a liaison with her protégé, the young German , brilliantly over-the-top author Tim Ardenne has that Lars Eidinger plays with self-deprecating verve.
First you are catapulted into the 1970s and to Dublin, where Joan (played here by Freya Mavor, who in “The End of a Story” is already the young version of Charlotte Rambling embodied) works as an au pair. Her gaze sweeps across a square and lingers on a young charmer (Èanna Hardwicke) who is just plucking the pearl necklace from an old lady’s neck. The criminal energy fuels the tingling of a love flirt, but also the imagination of stories: “What if the chain is the last thing the old lady has left from her beloved husband?” Joan accuses the pickpocket. “But maybe it’s the complete opposite,” he defends himself, “maybe she’s a terrible person, evil and stingy, and her husband hanged himself because he couldn’t stand her anymore. She probably has the pearls off her neck mother lying on her deathbed…” Everyone bends the facts in a way that makes them comfortable, from the little things to the big tragedies.
In his second film direction, the theater director and screenwriter Laurent Larivière skilfully varies the play with memory and imagination, which produces different versions of a story, of a life. In the suicide note left by her mother Joan, she tells of the happiness she found with the Japanese martial artist she left her family for, following her to Tokyo only to instantly correct that version of her life: The Man quickly turned out to be a scoundrel and she returned to France alone. “But which story do you prefer?” she asks the daughter.
With self-ironic verve: Lars Eidinger plays the young German author Tim Ardenne, who is ingeniously extravagant and has a love affair with his publisher Joan (Isabelle Huppert).
(Photo: Camino film distribution)
At the heart of the film is a surreally lustful sex scene between the mother and a giant octopus, which entangles and penetrates her with its tentacles. Later, the scene is put into perspective, only hanging as a small, framed print on the wall of Joan’s country house: It’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by Hokusai. Joan’s adult son, who is visiting from Montréal, comments in passing that the picture used to frighten him. Even more than the picture, the son is surrounded by a secret. The relationship between him and his single mother is charged, in the movement between the times there are always irritations, new secrets and truths are always revealed. Both mother and son assert their freedom and independence and at the same time are very devoted and close to each other.
In Canada, Nathan researches memory and forgetting. He tells his mother about a mouse that swims for its life in milky liquid until it finds the pedestal of salvation hidden beneath the surface. The next day she swims purposefully towards it. On the third day, she is injected with a drug that takes away this realization. And then, instead of the mouse, Isabelle Huppert swims in the white sea, between panic and the happiness of forgetting. A wonderful, melancholic, mysterious film.
Speaking of Joan, France, Germany, Ireland, 2022. Director: Laurent Larivière. Book: L. Larivière, François Decodts. Camera: Celine Bozon. Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Lars Eidinger, Freya Mavor, Swann Arlaud, Stanley Tonwsend, Éanna Hardwicke. Camino film rental, 101 minutes. Theatrical release: August 31, 2022