In his third stint editing for Amalric, François Gédigier offers a deft, often poetic, hand. Might an escape into the throes of imagination spare her-and by extension, us-from sorrow? Amalric seems to suggest that escapism, however tenuous, can at times prove the only available recourse to agency. Had to find something, right?” A film indebted to the powers of fantasy, Hold Me Tight is also a film about translation-how a woman can seamlessly shift from French to German just as she can make inscrutable loss legible to herself. “I’m inventing,” we hear her say as she steers Marc’s retro station wagon across southwestern France, listening to a cassette recording of her daughter’s piano playing. “It’s human.”Īs plausible a victim as a perpetrator, Krieps has a way of merging warmth with grit that defies maternal stereotypes. That’s what happens,” she imagines Marc explaining to their kids. As the frost thaws, so too does the power of Clarisse’s magical thinking. Her rotating array of scarves, sweaters, and coats suggest a winter trip away from home. In an early scene, Clarisse packs a bag and scurries from her home at dawn, a few trees still glowing with residual foliage. Given the mercurial shifts between place and time, limited subjectivity and omniscience, seasonal weather becomes a way to untangle a story disassembled from chronology. Set within the course of a year, one that seems to start with Clarisse’s surprise departure, Hold Me Tight vacillates between her solo peregrinations and her family’s (possibly hypothetical) response. Described by its press team (a bit evasively) as a movie about “a woman on the run from her family,” Hold Me Tight deftly unsettles what it means to “leave”-emotionally, physically, and spiritually-when staying put may prove impossible to bear. This is a film that demands, and rewards, a keenly attentive viewer. “And Marc-Marc was furniture.”Īmalric’s adaptation of a play by Claudine Galea feels fully cinematic, and takes full advantage of the medium’s ability to whisk the viewer from one perspective and temporality to another. “Sometimes I wanted to throw the kids out of the window,” Clarisse confesses to a colleague, swigging a bottle of apricot juice. She loves her family but also finds them suffocating. Cale’s “Cherry” while roaming the freeways in a pristine ’79 Pacer. She smokes indoors and shames a stranger in German for publicly scolding his son. As Clarisse, a thirty-something wife to Marc (Arieh Worthalter) and mother to Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet and Juliette Benveniste) and Paul (Sacha Ardilly and Aurèle Grzesik), Krieps is as sharp-edged and stubborn as she is suddenly ebullient. Now we have Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight, Mathieu Amalric’s wildly original exploration of maternal ambivalence, joy, and mourning. And, more recently, there’s Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter (2022), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s examination of a mother who decides to leave her husband and toddler girls for a rapturous affair. There’s Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea (2016), Kenneth Lonergan’s drama about a working-class family suffering from the aftermath of a house fire. There’s Juliette Binoche in Blue (1993), Krzysztof Kieslowski’s visually transportive meditation on a woman recovering from a tragic car wreck. Among the films that have, it is largely thanks to the expressive force of their female leads. Mathieu Amalric, France, Kino Lorberįew films have done justice to the sublime demands of motherhood-even fewer the gravity of losing one’s children, whether by choosing to abandon them or the insuperable woe following their premature death.
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