Saturday, November 24, 2007
La Vie Promise: Sylvia and her Roadsong with Nature
Road trips are such a natural topic for the cinema since both require time and have the potential of something transformational occurring over the course of the trip and/or the ninety minutes to two hours spent viewing it.
In a prior post, I wrote of how coming to the attention of the work of French director Oliver Dahan was the major benefit for me of time spent watching his film about Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose. As a result of viewing the Piaf film, I watched his 2002 film, La Vie Promise with seemingly eternal French goddess actress, Isabelle Huppert, who I have admired in films for thirty years.
The journey of La Vie Promise begins when a prostitute and her daughter have to leave after the daughter has wounded or killed one of her mother's "bosses" in a skirmish with a knife. There is always sky and flowers an mountains as they travel to and through Sylvia's past and towards an unknown thereafter. It features some of the loveliest sunset cutaways on the other side of Days of Heaven.
The success of this film on the viewer, it seems to me is on the willingness to take the journey and observe the bits of character, plot and circumstance that are skin that are stripped a few layers back like onion skin from the characters. Sylvia, her daughter, and the mysterious stranger are not the same folks you make at the film as they are at the beginning, if one chooses to invest care and interest in them at all.
The simplicity of this plot, the film's use of music and the empathy of the characters remind me of Wenders, who even named his production company Road Movies. And with that connection in mind, La Vie Promise does remind me of a folkrock chamber music version of Paris, Texas with the genders reversed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:23 PM
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