Review of Gabrielle (2005) by Sarah R — 10 Sep 2006

Jean and Gabrielle Hervey are a wealthy middle-aged couple living in Paris in the early 1900s. They have a nice house with plenty of uniformed servants who bustle around helping them to get dressed and undressed and cooking for them and serving them extravagant multi-course dinners. Gabrielle's clothing seems especially complicated with pins and buttons and laces to be done and undone and countless layers of flimsy, lacy, seemingly redundant garments all worn one on top of the other sort of like those confusing extra envelopes and pieces of tissue paper you find in formal wedding invitations. I think well if someone went to the trouble to purchase this delicate little piece of paper and to stuff it into the envelope with my invitation, well then it must have some sort of purpose, mustn't it? But what could its purpose possibly be, huh?

In addition to her time-consuming hobby of changing her elaborate outfits several times a day, Gabrielle is also quite active socially. She and Jean host get-togethers every Thursday night where society people gather to eat and smoke and engage in lively conversation. Not lively for me, mind you, but I assume that if their friends didn't enjoy it they wouldn't keep coming back. Jean doesn't actually love Gabrielle, but he admires certain things about her, in particular the fact that her skin is so pasty that you can make out many of her veins quite clearly. This seems like a rather flimsy foundation for a marriage but there you go.

One day, Jean is walking home from the train wearing his bowler hat and feeling quite smug about how tall and successful and confident he is and how he has such a large circle of friends and a fine wife with prominent veins and how even though they don't ever actually have sex, he still insists that they sleep in separate beds in the same room for appearance's sake. We know he's feeling like this because we hear him thinking it aloud as he strides along towards his beautiful house where he's greeted at the door by coat and hat-taking servants who buff his shoes and tell him that Gabrielle isn't home.

Jean walks to his room to fix himself a drink and then he sees it: an ominous white envelope that could be nothing but...you guessed it... a "Dear Jean" letter. Scary violin music swells as he reaches for the letter again and again in slow motion instant replay. His stunned reaction to its contents -- his wife has left him for another man (gasp!) -- sends the crystal liquor decanter he's holding crashing to the ground, no doubt a metaphor for the sudden shattering of his loveless yet contented marriage to the translucent-skinned, blue-templed Gabrielle.

An hour or so passes and Jean is still just sitting there staring into space with a horrified look on his face, no doubt wondering what his society friends will think of this embarrassing debacle, when who should walk into the room but his newly estranged wife Gabrielle. It seems she's changed her mind and has returned to Jean. I don't exactly know why she did this but she did and here she is.

Jean is pissed. He doesn't want to know who the man is but he wants other details like what he said and what she said and why she came back and so on. Gabrielle doesn't say much but she does admit that she and her other man did more than just sleep in separate beds in the same room and that she liked it. Oh, did you now, says Jean, or something to that effect. Well what about with me then?

"The thought of your sperm inside me is unbearable," she replies.

OUCH!!!

And it's all downhill from here. Just one scathing comment after another for the rest of the film. Why are these people even together if they hold each other in such utter contempt? And why am I watching them? Not only are they extremely unpleasant, but they're also quite boring. I had to fight to keep my eyes open and it was only four o'clock in the afternoon.

For some reason, which I tried at least a little bit to figure out, some of the scenes are in black and white while others are in color. I assume that there's some sort of pattern to this but it's not quite so obvious as when Dorothy and her house go crashing into Oz. Or at least it's not to me. To me it seemed completely random and pointless and stagy, as were these occasional scenes where soundless screens of printed dialogue would suddenly replace the real thing.

For me, there was only one good thing about this movie and it really had nothing to do with the actual movie itself. I rode my bike to the theater as I tend to do, but upon arriving, I discovered that I'd forgotten my keys which meant that I couldn't lock up my bike. When I explained my predicament to the ticket girl, she said no problem, she'd just put it in the basement so I could still see the movie. So yay for the Music Box theater. The film may have sucked but the service was outstanding.