In life many times the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence . Both stars in this film are excellent and perfectly cast . Is the glass half empty or half full ? Sometimes it takes a shock to see that your glass is full and has been all the time . This is a beautiful movie and a" must see" for Marion Cotillard fans . It also could double for a marriage counceling film !!!!!!! True love is hard to find and sometimes harder to see .

I watched this at home on DVD from my local library. My wife skipped, she doesn't enjoy reading subtitles. It is mostly in French and I watched it with English subtitles.I got the movie mainly because it features Marion Cotillard. She is a lovely lady and one of the best actresses of the current generation. Here she is Gabrielle, part of a farming family in France that includes her dad and mom, plus a younger sister. We see that she was difficult growing up, what some may call "mean." And also fixated on nudity and sex. Looking like she might never marry, her parents made a deal with one of the workers, a Mr. Rabascal, if he would marry her then they would help set him up with his own masonry business. He agrees, Gabrielle eventually goes along, but she tells him directly that she will never love him and they will not have husband-wife relations. In her magnanimity she tells him she doesn't mind if he goes into the city to hire a prostitute.I will not say much more except to say it is mainly a character study of Gabrielle, how she deals with her difficult personality, in the end trying to achieve some happiness with her husband and son who has a gift for playing the piano.Marion Cotillard is superb.

Gabrielle, a stunning embodiment of 1950s Provence hysteria in full HD, yearns, craves and longs. Her oozing desire is disruptive to those around her and excruciatingly painful for her to bear, pushing her into silently abundant jouissance beyond words, which passes through her body in cramps of both pain and pleasure. Bearing such free-floating desire in turn makes Gabrielle barren - her wandering womb (the ancient Greek explanation for hysteria) refuses to stay attached to one place and nurture a fetus, conceived in what Gabrielle perceives a loveless marriage with Jose.Diagnosed with kidney stones as the scientific explanation for her ailments, Gabrielle is subsequently sent off to a mountain resort, one with uncanny ability to dive into the hemispheres of the unconscious mind, strangely resembling Mann's Magic Mountain, thus allowing Gabrielle to spill her desire over reality itself, over time and memory as she meets a charming young man, physically and emotionally absent enough for her to project her longing onto him, for him to play a phantasmatic figure in her own monodrama of Wuthering Heights. She can finally live her jouissance fully and completely by bringing her unconscious phantasies to life as the object of these phantasies, on the other hand, slips into death. The love scene portraying the perfect union comes to stand for a breathtaking example of how the mechanisms of trauma, repression and narcissistic loss (melancholia) work. The trauma of loss (not of the man Gabrielle thought she had loved, but of her own narcissistic self in and with his death) becomes repressed and another scene happens in Gabrielle's mind instead, which secures linearity of Gabrielle's historic self. She can only come to decipher this event years later via the narrative of the silent Jose, whose silences had been nurturing silent gaps in Gabrielle's memory until she was finally ready to bear them. Until she was finally ready for a dialogue. Until she was finally ready to hear Jose speak his story. This film is a remarkable narrative of a ruthless abundance of feminine desire that longs for a language to speak itself, and take ownership of the ambivalent continuity of self, which is all but linear. Cotillard is exquisite in this role, and so is the cinematographic gaze following movements of her wandering/wuthering womb.

Amazing movie remember me of A Beautiful Mind this time in a love story.Amazing movie despite low rating, it is a must watch movie. I personally put it on my top list of preferred movies.Just watch it and ignore its low rating...many people may not understand it.