Au Natural

Kristin Scott Thomas fits perfectly into I've Loved You So Long and Lance Hammer coaxes lived-in performances out of non-actors in Ballast.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Nov 12, 2008

LOVE YOU LONG TIME: Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) stands by her distant, vitreous sister Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) in Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The pleasant surprise of seeing Kristin Scott Thomas in a small part in Tell No One was followed rapidly by a sense of shock at how long it had been since last we'd seen her. Not counting her role as a D.C. socialite in The Walker, which opened in a smattering of cities at the end of last year, it's been nearly seven years, in 2001's Gosford Park, since Scott Thomas has had a substantial role to chew on.

It took a switch in languages, and cultures, for Scott Thomas to find a role befitting her talents and her maturity. The English-language cinema's lack of interest in women of a certain age is so well-established it's almost a sick joke, but the French seem to have no such hang-ups. It's impossible to think of an American analogue to Catherine Deneuve or Isabelle Huppert, actresses who have continued to amaze and enthrall well into middle and old age.

In I've Loved You So Long, the first feature directed by the French novelist Philippe Claudel, Scott Thomas seems to be made of glass: fragile but sharp-edged, transparent but impermeable. Her skin, untouched by makeup, resembles those oceanic creatures that dwell in waters beyond the sun's reach, so used to living under pressure that when it is removed they can explode.

Scott Thomas plays Juliette Fontaine, the French-raised daughter of an English mother who has been estranged from her sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) for 15 years, most of which Juliette has spent in prison for a horrific crime whose particulars Claudel dispenses with parsimonious exactitude. When they first meet in a airport café, it's not even clear that the two women are related, and it takes a while for anything resembling sisterly affection to return to their relationship.

Installed in Léa's home along with her husband, Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), and their two adopted Vietnamese children, Juliette slowly eases herself back into the world, but it's not always clear she wants to return. Consumed by guilt and anger, Juliette seems at times determined to suffer in silence, alone and apart. Just when the movie threatens to slip into a tender moment, something will trip Juliette's internal alarm, and she'll lash out or slink away.

Everyone in Claudel's film has been beaten down by life, from the parole officer whose ex-wife has taken their child far away to an Iraqi doctor whose wife and children were killed by a stray bomb. At once the traumatizer and the traumatized, Juliette has curled up inside herself. With ice-cold control, Scott Thomas takes Juliette through a series of advances and retreats, poking her head out into the air and withdrawing like an anxious turtle.

Like many novelists-turned-filmmakers, Claudel has a tendency to underline his symbols, especially when they are composed in literary and not visual terms, and some of that deliberateness infects Scott Thomas' performance. It is magnificent on first viewing, and somewhat less so on second. Rather than expanding, the character diminishes once you know where the movie is going. It's an emotional suspense thriller, building to a climactic revelation and then ending almost immediately thereafter. The format requires Claudel to stage a number of scenes with obstreperous, obnoxious and occasionally inebriated characters who press Juliette on the nature of her crime, a device that injects a note of contrivance into the movie's scrupulous naturalism.

But for a first-timer, Claudel shows great skill with actors. Not just Scott Thomas, who gives what may well be the performance of her career, but Zylberstein, an uneven actress who needs a sure hand behind the camera, and the rest of the cast, on down to the smallest roles. He makes the world around Juliette seem like a place worth returning to.

Micheal J. Smith Sr., the central figure in Lance Hammer's Ballast, has never acted before, but his hulking frame and lumbering gait convey his character's withdrawal from the world. After his twin brother kills himself, Lawrence (Smith) can't even bring himself to leave his tiny house, situated on a small plot of land in the Mississippi Delta. With his brother's body bleeding into the bedsheets in the back bedroom, Lawrence keeps outsiders at bay, eventually using the gun with which his brother killed himself to put a hole in his own chest.

Lawrence survives with the help of surgery that uses tissue from one lung to heal the hole in the other, one of many instances in Hammer's film in which injuries are healed by another's sacrifice. Shot in glimmery handheld widescreen by Lol Crawley, Ballast is filled with freighted symbols, like the matching houses belonging to Lawrence and his late brother, but Hammer deploys them without comment or self-consciousness. They're built into the fabric of the movie, not pasted onto its surface.

As a white director working with a largely African-American and entirely nonprofessional cast, Hammer runs the risk of the kind of aesthetic condescension that mars David Gordon Green's George Washington, but his collaborative methods give the scenes a lived-in feel. Although Hammer is credited with the screenplay, the movie had no script per se. Hammer built the film from scratch with his actors over a period of months, keeping key plot points from them until it was time to shoot so their reactions would be unstudied and natural. Hammer doesn't need to telegraph his realism with grainy film stock and shaky camera; the movie's authenticity is genuine, and not a special effect.

Lawrence is joined in his torpor by 12-year-old James (JimMyron Ross), a rootless boy on the verge of turning into a teenage thug, and James' mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), a recovering drug addict trying to keep them both afloat with her menial paychecks. The three meet at the bottom, but Hammer isn't interested in pitying them or bemoaning their plight. Ballast is less a film of protest than survival, demonstrating the lengths, at once extraordinary and unremarkable, to which the characters will go to save each other.

Ballast is a quiet, delicately beautiful work, an assured debut that handily skirts the pitfalls of neo-neorealism. The movie's characters aren't specimens, or representatives, but distinct and complicated individuals whose shortcomings are outweighed by their generosity of spirit. They give back to each other, and Ballast gives back to us.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

I've Loved You So Long (Recommended) | Written and directed by Philippe Claudel | A Sony Classics release

Ballast (Recommended) | Written and directed by Lance Hammer | An Alluvial/Required Viewing release

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