Léa Seydoux is superb as a wife who will not believe what she has been told. Marie Kreutzer’s drama is honest and bleak, and it keeps leaving her for a second story that is not as good. See it for Seydoux.
Marie Kreutzer’s last film, Corsage, kept one woman in the centre of the frame for two hours and dared us to look away. Gentle Monster starts with the same idea. Lucy Weiss (Léa Seydoux), a pianist with a husband, a family and a life that appears to be going well, opens the door to the police and learns that Philip (Laurence Rupp) has been arrested for possessing images of children. The film is not about him. It is about what she knew, what she ought to have known, and what she is now expected to do about a man she still, appallingly, loves. That is a hard and proper subject, and for its first hour the film is equal to it. Then it starts adding things, and by the end it has added too many.
Seydoux is the reason to go. She plays Lucy’s denial not as stupidity but as a kind of manners, the reflex of a woman who has spent her life being reasonable and cannot stop now. Watch her in the police interview, answering questions about her own marriage as though they were about someone else’s, and you can see the exact moment the reasonable answers run out. We felt something close to nausea sitting through that scene, and it was nothing the film showed us; it was Seydoux’s face working out what a sentence meant a half-second after saying it. Rupp, wisely, is given almost nothing. He is a shape in a doorway, a voice on a phone, and the film does not let him plead.
Kreutzer and her cinematographer Judith Kaufmann shoot Lucy’s world in the cool, even light of good flats and rehearsal rooms, and they stay on her rather than cutting to what she is looking at, so that we learn most of what happens by watching it arrive in her expression. Camille’s score is sparing and low, and it never tells us to feel what Seydoux has already made us feel. Monika Buttinger dresses Lucy in the clothes of someone who has never had to think about being looked at, and then keeps her in them while she is looked at by everyone. It is quiet, careful work and it serves the performance.
The trouble is the second story. Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase) is a younger woman with her own bad loyalty to a man, and the film means her as a rhyme for Lucy: two women who will not see what is in front of them. Haase is good, and Sylvester Groth is unnerving as Hermann Kühn. But every time Ulrike Kofler cuts from Seydoux to Haase we lost something, and the film did not give it back. The two stories are made to weigh the same, and they do not. Flashbacks arrive to explain what the present had already shown us, and the dialogue slips between languages in a way that sometimes reads as the characters’ lives and sometimes as the co-production’s paperwork.
Catherine Deneuve is on hand as Eryn, and the film is glad of her without ever quite deciding what she is for. Regina Fritsch, as Inge Weiss, has one scene of family loyalty that is as chilling as anything here, because it is so ordinary. Katharina Lorenz’s Maike is the friend who says the thing nobody else will, and the film could have used more of her.
What Kreutzer gets right matters. She does not put the offender at the centre, she does not make his crimes a puzzle to be solved, and she does not offer Lucy an exit that the real world would not. Most critics have credited her for that and we do; the film’s refusal to comfort is its best quality and it holds to it. But Corsage had one idea and one woman and trusted them both for the whole length, and this has two of each and trusts neither for long enough. By the last half hour we had stopped feeling sick and started feeling managed, which for a film this serious is the wrong way round.
It runs 114 minutes and carries a 15. Go for Seydoux, and go knowing that the film around her is bleak without relief, and that it will keep cutting away at the moments you least want it to.
