ShareThisTwo dramas starring top-notch actors and written by popular novelists highlight this week's DVD releases, but with very different results.
"I've Loved You So Long" (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $28.96, rated PG-13), a French-German co-production starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein that was written and directed by French novelist and first-time filmmaker Philippe Claudel, works as a compelling tale of estrangement and redemption between two sisters.
But "In the Electric Mist" (Image Entertainment, $27.98, rated R), a U.S.-French co-production directed by veteran French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier ("'Round Midnight," "A Sunday in the Country") and featuring a strong ensemble cast including Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, Peter Sarsgaard and Mary Steenburgen, falls apart due to convoluted plotting.
Scott Thomas ("The English Patient," "Gosford Park") is most familiar to American audiences for playing glamorous, haughty and somewhat mysterious characters. As a result, her first appearance as Juliette Fontaine in 2008's "I've Loved You So Long" looking gaunt, pale, weary and nervous comes as a shock. Yet much more shocking are her circumstances: She's just been released from prison, where she spent 15 years for murder, and has been paroled to live in the city of Nancy with her younger sister Lea (Zylberstein), a college professor of literature she has not seen in all those years, and Lea's family.
Claudel methodically tells his story about Juliette's re-entrance into society and getting reacquainted with her family. Slowly we learn about Juliette's background as a successful doctor and Lea's adored older sister. The nature of Juliette's crime and her family's reaction to it is also revealed over time, as we see why prospective employers won't hire her and why Lea's husband (Serge Hazanavicius) fears leaving her alone with their two daughters.
Yet despite Juliette's still being incarcerated in an emotional prison, this shattered woman begins to rebuild her life -- helped greatly by her charming and inquisitive 8-year-old niece (Lise Segur) and by the growing closeness and understanding that develops between the two sisters.
Forgiveness and redemption don't come easily in "I've Loved You So Long." Claudel offers no easy answers to questions of guilt and responsibility, devotion and remorse. But the brilliant performances of Scott Thomas and Zylberstein make the story transpire in ways that are heartbreaking, believable and memorable.
One nice touch about the DVD: The film, nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, was shot in French, taking advantage of the linguistic fluency of Scott Thomas, who has lived in France for decades. But for those who would prefer not to read English subtitles, the DVD includes an English-language soundtrack featuring the voice of Scott Thomas.
Tommy Lee Jones is typically fine as Louisiana police Detective Dave Robicheaux in "In the Electric Mist," an atmospheric thriller. Based on James Lee Burke's 1993 novel "In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead" but updated to post-Katrina Louisiana by screenwriters Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, the 2009 film follows Robicheaux as he investigates several brutal murders of women and the apparently unrelated discovery of the body of an African-American prisoner who had escaped from jail four decades earlier.
Jones' Robicheaux is methodical, undeterred and borderline obsessive in his pursuit of the truth. Like Clint Eastwood's Detective Harry Callahan, Robicheaux doesn't mind busting a few heads, trampling a few civil liberties and breaking a few laws in his investigations. (Alec Baldwin portrayed Robicheaux in an earlier screen adaptation of a Burke novel, the 1996 thriller "Heaven's Prisoners.")
"In the Electric Mist" throws in additional plot lines about a gangster (Goodman) who's returned to Louisiana to finance redevelopment, movies and more; a frequently drunk, possibly suicidal movie star (Sarsgaard) and his long-suffering girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald); the ghost of a Confederate general (Levon Helm) who speaks to Robicheaux, and the racism and corruption pervading Louisiana in both the past and the present.
Tavernier and cinematographer Bruno de Keyzer provide an appropriately swampy and steamy milieu for all of this, and the score -- made up of both familiar and new Cajun, zydeco and blues tunes, some performed by guitarist Buddy Guy, who also has a small role in the film -- is similarly evocative.
But the movie feels chopped up and incomplete. Scenes end abruptly and fail to connect adequately with the next. That was this critic's impression even before I learned that the American straight-to-DVD version reviewed here is 15 minutes shorter than the director's-cut version that recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and will be released theatrically in Europe.
While I cannot say that Tavernier's version eliminates the aforementioned problems, there's no doubt that whoever cut out a quarter of an hour from "In the Electric Mist" has left behind a movie that flows poorly and is unnecessarily confusing.
(brucedancis(at)comcast.net.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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