The marriage at the center of Gabrielle dissolves as a result of apathy, but there’s nothing lethargic about Patrice Chéreau’s period piece, an emotionally explosive adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story "The Return" that simmers with anger, resentment and long-suppressed desire. Walking from the train to his Paris home in what appears to be the early 20th-century, pompous bourgeois prig Jean (Pascal Greggory) ruminates on his life, career and spouse like a man monotonously ticking items off of a checklist. His mansion as cold and sterile as a sarcophagus and filled with marble busts and statues that speak to his primary interest in the acquisition and display of material goods, Jean admits that he lost interest in romance or sex after he’d secured Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert) as his wife. When Gabrielle leaves a Dear John note indicating that she’s running off with another man, only to then return home after reconsidering, the sparks fly, with Greggory effectively conveying his character’s epiphany regarding both the limits of his authority and the price of indifference, and the regal Huppert – whose role has been expanded from Conrad’s male-perspective source material, and whose roused passions are matched by the sight of her veins glowing underneath her pale skin – radiating icy antipathy that comes to a head in her scathing confession to Jean that “The thought of your sperm inside me is unbearable.” Chéreau’s sumptuously immediate cinematography visualizes the increasingly vitriolic tête-à-tête’s shifts in mood and temperament by alternating between black-and-white and color, though it’s his intimate camerawork that, by assuming the position of an unseen spectator and, thus, placing us directly in the middle of this catastrophically crumbling relationship, gives the film a vivid, pulsating heat.
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