Gabrielle

I HATED this movie. I can’t remember the last time I HATED a movie. Because I Said So was profoundly bad but at least I came out of the theater laughing at it. Can’t remember the last time a movie made me so violently mad.

Bombastic score, awful. Pacing and editing, awful. Intertitles, absurd and awful. Shuffling between B&W and color photography, inexplicable and awful. Plot dull, narration annoying. All of which would ordinarily put it at a ** at worst, plus points for Huppert’s usual awesomeness.

A film has to work harder to earn my hate, and this one does: Gabrielle has a sort of captive power, shown here to be real power. It is one thing to say objectively that in this time period, in this social class, women’s sphere of influence is limited to the home, to emotional and sexual manipulation. It is quite another to say yes, and doesn’t that make her powerful, free, and look, she’ll win in the end! I agree with Allison: it also says what it sets out to within the first ten minutes, and it does it bluntly, with banality: “She was my finest possession,” blah blah, oh I haven’t heard that before. Plus the director’s puffed up opinion of himself in the special features really cheesed me off. Two great performances in this movie, but performances can’t save anything this awful. AWFUL!