Francois Mauriac's novel "Thérèse Desqueyroux" is set in the Landes, a sparsely populated rural area of south-western France consisting mostly of pine forests and heathland. (Argelouse, the village where much of the action takes place, is a real one). His heroine Thérèse is in a similar position to Emma Bovary, another French literary heroine who finds herself dissatisfied with marriage to a dull provincial bourgeois and with the conformist culture of "la France profonde". The difference between the two is that whereas Madame Bovary ends up poisoning herself, Thérèse tries (unsuccessfully) to poison her husband, Bernard.
By the standards of the 1920s, Mauriac's was something of an experimental novel, making use of non-linear narrative, jumps backwards and forwards in time and sudden switches between first-person and third-person narration. The director Claude Miller, in his last film before his death, keeps Mauriac's plot but, wisely, does not attempt to imitate his structure, telling the story in a much more linear fashion. It starts with Thérèse's girlhood and her friendship with Bernard's half-sister Anne; because Thérèse comes from another well-to-do family it is assumed that she will many Bernard, even though he is considerably older than her and they have little in common.
Their marriage is predictably unhappy, to the extent that she comes to see murder as the solution to all her difficulties. She is, however, never punished for her crime- fearful of any scandal attaching to their name, all the family, even Bernard himself, conspire to secure Thérèse's acquittal, on the understanding that they will afterwards separate. The do not, however, divorce, something which was officially legal in the France of the 1920s, but would not have been socially acceptable in a conservative, Catholic rural area.
A sub-plot deals with the romance between Anne and a young man named Jean Azevedo which scandalises her family because he is Jewish and regarded as an outsider. As in the book there is some suggestion of a lesbian attraction between Thérèse and Bernard's younger half-sister Anne, but this is not fully developed.
The novel has a powerful sense of place; Mauriac is able to conjure up a vivid picture of the Landes, something reflected here by the striking photography of the area. This is important, because Mauriac uses his descriptions of the physical landscape as a metaphor for the mental and moral landscape of its inhabitants, whose stifling conformity is as barren as its sandy soils.
The main difficulty I had with the film was the same as the one I had when reading the novel, namely that we never get a clear view of what sort of person Thérèse really is. In particular, Mauriac never provides a clear explanation for her crime. Bernard- dull, conventional, complacent and selfish, obsessed with hunting, his dogs and his estates- is far from being an ideal husband, but he is not a monster, and we never really understand why his wife should have conceived so violent a hatred for him or why she should have resorted to such desperate means of trying to rid herself of him. There is a good performance from Audrey Tautou, a better actress in her native language than she is in English, and another good performance from Gilles Lellouche as the stolid Bernard, but even these performances do not help me overcome this difficulty. 7/10.
By the standards of the 1920s, Mauriac's was something of an experimental novel, making use of non-linear narrative, jumps backwards and forwards in time and sudden switches between first-person and third-person narration. The director Claude Miller, in his last film before his death, keeps Mauriac's plot but, wisely, does not attempt to imitate his structure, telling the story in a much more linear fashion. It starts with Thérèse's girlhood and her friendship with Bernard's half-sister Anne; because Thérèse comes from another well-to-do family it is assumed that she will many Bernard, even though he is considerably older than her and they have little in common.
Their marriage is predictably unhappy, to the extent that she comes to see murder as the solution to all her difficulties. She is, however, never punished for her crime- fearful of any scandal attaching to their name, all the family, even Bernard himself, conspire to secure Thérèse's acquittal, on the understanding that they will afterwards separate. The do not, however, divorce, something which was officially legal in the France of the 1920s, but would not have been socially acceptable in a conservative, Catholic rural area.
A sub-plot deals with the romance between Anne and a young man named Jean Azevedo which scandalises her family because he is Jewish and regarded as an outsider. As in the book there is some suggestion of a lesbian attraction between Thérèse and Bernard's younger half-sister Anne, but this is not fully developed.
The novel has a powerful sense of place; Mauriac is able to conjure up a vivid picture of the Landes, something reflected here by the striking photography of the area. This is important, because Mauriac uses his descriptions of the physical landscape as a metaphor for the mental and moral landscape of its inhabitants, whose stifling conformity is as barren as its sandy soils.
The main difficulty I had with the film was the same as the one I had when reading the novel, namely that we never get a clear view of what sort of person Thérèse really is. In particular, Mauriac never provides a clear explanation for her crime. Bernard- dull, conventional, complacent and selfish, obsessed with hunting, his dogs and his estates- is far from being an ideal husband, but he is not a monster, and we never really understand why his wife should have conceived so violent a hatred for him or why she should have resorted to such desperate means of trying to rid herself of him. There is a good performance from Audrey Tautou, a better actress in her native language than she is in English, and another good performance from Gilles Lellouche as the stolid Bernard, but even these performances do not help me overcome this difficulty. 7/10.