Themes: Battling Illness, Mothers and Sons, Wrongly Committed
Main Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Magalie Woch
Release Year: 2004
Country: FR
Run Time: 150 minutes
Plot
The stories of two desperate characters turn out to share an important link in this drama from French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin. Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) is a woman in her mid-thirties who wants people to believe that her life is going just the way she wants. But a look below the surface shows this isn't quite the case; she's been divorced twice, her latest relationship is on the rocks, her ten-year-old son, Elias (Valentin Lelong), is becoming increasingly withdrawn, and her father (Maurice Garrel) is in poor health. When Nora learns that her father's digestive problems are actually cancer and he may only have a few days left to live, she desperately wants to turn to Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), her second husband. But Ismael is having a crisis of his own after a pattern of increasingly strange behavior has led him to an involuntary stay in a mental hospital. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Nora Cotterelle, a woman in her 30s is caring for her ill father, Louis Jenssens. While Nora tries to present a facade that all is well with her life, she is twice divorced and has a son, Elias, whose father is dead. Nora's present relationship is not going well, and she is soon to marry a businessman, while Elias is becoming increasingly withdrawn. A parallel storyline follows her former lover and second husband, Ismaël Vuillard, a musician, with whom she had lived for seven years. He is given to strange behaviour, and as a result he has been committed to a mental hospital, from which he is planning to escape. Nora learns that her father's digestive problems are actually cancer, and facing her father's death, Nora desperately seeks out Ismaël to ask that he reconnect with Elias, but he has mixed feelings about adopting her son. Moreover, he has met Arielle, another patient.
