I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG
Directed by Phillipe Claudel, France, 2008, 115 minutes, 12A certificate
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein

Kristin Scott Thomas is Juliette, a doctor recently released after 15 years in prison for a crime that her family can scarcely speak of.  Her younger sister Léa collects her from a provincial airport at the opening of the film, and takes her home to live with her husband, father in law and young children. Thus begins Juliette’s gradual and tentative renegotiation of a normal life.

Juliette has had time to confront and acknowledge the reality of her crime, but must now reconcile that crime with the business of living and negotiate the minefield of others’ responses: the family who strenuously avoid the grim secret only mentioned in hushed whispers, the curious acquaintances seeking to expose something of this beautiful woman’s mysterious past, the inadvertently brutal questions of her young nieces.

Claudel’s absorbing and literate film is a consideration of what imprisonment means, and how rehabilitation is made possible not in institutions but through human contact. In Scott Thomas’ magnificent and subtle performance we witness Juliette’s adjustment – so gradual as to be almost imperceptible – from terrified withdrawal towards an emerging confidence in herself and the life she might yet hope for. Juliette comes to accept that she is deserving of love in spite of her crime - that prison from which she will never be free.

One of the most intelligent and powerfully moving films of 2008.

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