Cannes 2015: Valley Of Love Review - Great Acting, Hand-Wavy Plot
A slight film that never rises to its full promise.
Rating: Throughout Valley Of Love the characters complain about the heat. Set in Death Valley, Nevada (see the obviously cathartic naming), this sets up the location as being a character in its own right, a blistering backdrop to an emotionally exhausting love story. The problem is that these complaints aren't carried over to the screen - the baking sun and rocky outcrops are shot in a rather pedestrian manner, not helped by the fact that some of the locations looking like they were realised in green screen. It's endemic of a film that comes across as nice, but little more; a joyful timekiller, but not something worthy of the Palme d'Or. Gérard Depardieu (playing Gérard) and Isabelle Huppert (playing Isabelle) are two divorced actors (the meta humour is downplayed, merely serving as a jumping off point for the performances) brought to the American west at the request of their dead son. He wants them to visit seven locations at specific times, promising that at one of them he'll give a sign and appear before them. Of course, as you'd guess, the whole coming to terms with their son's suicide is really just a plot motivation to bring these two distant flames back together. Depardieu is as you'd expect; spot on. He's self-depreciating and wistful, with a general cynicism ultimately making him the film's emotional heart (even though it's Huppert the film follows to begin with). A sequence where he deals with a "fan" who's clearly never seen any of his movies is treated with eye-rolling acceptance rather than brimming frustration, doubling with the heat to embody exhaustion and highlighting the ageing of the perennial French star. The spiritual side of things, meanwhile, comes across as half-baked, trotted out whenever the plot needs to jump forward, but not a pervasive element to the story. Bringing in ghosts (or whatever you want to call it) into an otherwise grounded film is always a risky move and here it's never fully justified. Things are much better when the focus is on the couple. One of the film's best scenes has Gérard reminisce about a hotel he and Isabelle visited back in the throes of young love, only for her to have no recollection of it. It's a subtle moment that says more about their past relationship than any other extended sequence (as the heat comments suggest, this is a film that's more about telling than showing, with varied results). Had the film consistently hit a level more like that then this could have been a well-balanced romance picture. As it is, it's a curio; a Competition film whose main appeal is the actors. Keep up with all of our Cannes 2015 coverage on the official page here.