LFF 2013: Abuse of Weakness

In 2004 French director Catherine Breillat suffered a stroke. Three years later, she was cheated out of nearly a million euros by a known conman whom she was intending to cast in a film. She later suggested he took advantage of her still-reduced mental capacities.

While it’s wonderful that Breillat overcame such multiple hardships to return to filmmaking, it’s unfortunate that she has chosen to convey these experiences onscreen. Sometimes autobiography adds piquancy to proceedings; as often, proximity to the material kills it. The result, here, truly flatters to deceive.

Isabelle Huppert stars as Maud, whom we first encounter as she’s having a stroke. The film’s opening phase deals, discomfortingly, with her recuperation. Back home, and still far from independent, Maud plans her next film. When she sees a TV interview with unrepentant former crook Vilko (Kool Shen), she decides he will be her leading man. The cocky ex-con agrees. But while the project makes no obvious progress, the pair embark on a strangely symbiotic relationship, in which he becomes a de facto carer – and she starts writing him some very large cheques.

The scene is set for a battle of wills, of wits, of psychological and sexual games – territory that Breillat has essayed many times before. But no such thing transpires; in fact, nothing much happens at all. Huppert’s typically bravura performance gives a punchy character to the suffering yet somehow still commanding Maud, but it can’t compensate for the absence of nuance in a flat, half-baked script. What ought to have been a thought-provoking account of vulnerability and manipulation leaves one unexpectedly underwhelmed.