Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Long Day's Journey Into The Next Day, October 10, 2008
This film presents this premise:
We choose many of our confinements.
Modern men and women have amazingly broad discretion to choose how we confine ourselves.
We choose the conditions under which we live.
The film starts off with a brief phrase, written in white against the black screen:
"A nos limites."
Translated: "To our boundaries."
The first scene is of a middle aged mother looking in the mirror at her shape in a new camisole. She is assessing if she is still visually attractive. We don't know it yet, but she is also asking herself if she should attempt a new path into a new relationship.
She is a single mother raising her two sons, who are now both young adults, but still live in the house they grew up in. Their father, who lost the house in the divorce settlement, and who always hoped the house would go to the boys, still lives in the same city and stops by occasionally to give the boys money.
Neither son pursues work, and both depend completely on their parents for financial support.
As the plot progresses, the conflicts of interest increase between the sons, who wish to stay and live an easy life in their parents' home, and their mother who would like to sell the home and go off to start a new life running a bed & breakfast.
Eventually, the mother receives more abuse from her sons than she can bear, so she leaves them in the house alone to live with each other.
The movie explores this question: What environments do your actions create for the people who live with you and depend on you?
I titled this review after O'Neill's famous play because of the movie's candid scenes of brutal verbal family fights. This film is focused on the question of: How do our actions of today effect the reality of our tomorrow? If we keep in the same patterns, will similar reality continue around us? This film is about real life and the cycles of daily life.
The sons become excessively inconsiderate and selfish, and in doing so, constrain their mother terribly, to the point she abandons them to fend for themselves. She can no longer carry them and live happily.
The movie suggests how we treat our "enemies," the people with whom we have strong conflicts of interest, probably says as much or more about us as how we treat the people we care about and with whom we are not in conflict. If you want to know someone more fully, investigate how they have treated their enemies and the people from their previous relationships.
The mother tries to venture off into a new life with a new love, but feels dutifully obligated to take care of her dysfunctional sons. She falls in love with a local chef who lives next door. Maybe more accurately, she falls in love with the world the chef creates with her when they are in each other's company. When we stay in a love relationship with someone, the love is not simply about how we interact and are drawn to the other person. Over time, the love thrives because we fall in love with the environments we create in each other's homes, activities, and social circles. We don't just fall in love with the person, we fall in love with the world they've created around them in the company of their familiars.
But the mother's new lover cannot abide the short-sightedness of her sons, and he chooses to step away until she deals with their behaviors.
I won't give away the final plot events, except to say the insensitivity and poor conflict-resolution-methods of the sons lead to a tragedy. The filmmakers intentionally do not define the tragic results, leaving the viewer with the intended question of:
Would would be worse? Would it be worse if the daily patterns and environments you create led to great harm of someone close to you? Or would it be worse if your actions effectively paralyzed others you depend on, limiting what they could do? How might your responses to conflict harm or limit the people closest to you?
The film is an exploration of boundaries, limits, and confinements.
Our lives are not determined by whether we "exceed" our limits or "stay within" our limits.
Our lives are determined by what we do with the limits we have, the limits we create, and the limits we choose.
Life is not limitless. There are many boundaries to many things. Some are chosen for us. Many we choose ourselves.
We are defined by what we do with the many limits surrounding us.
Those decisions determine the breadth and environments of our privately selected properties.
This is an excellent film, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Desire under the Roof, October 6, 2007
"Private Property" (Nue propriété ) primly begins with the dedication: "To Our Boundaries," which I assume, after seeing this film, is written tongue-in-cheek for this film smashes any logical/accepted boundaries between a Mother and her sons for starters.
Pascale (a blowsy, de-glamorized Isabelle Huppert) lives with her two sons, Thierry (a mean, feral Jeremie Renier) and Francois (the opposite of Thierry yet in real life the brother of Jeremie, Yannick Renier) in a country home filled with memories of a brutal divorce, the events leading up to the divorce and the detritus of hate, longing and betrayal that a bitter divorce leaves in it's wake. You know the scenario: the sons basically blame Pascale for the divorce and she blames her ex.
Pascale also feels strangled about her lot in life: her boys, really men roughly 23 or so treat her like a maid, mostly spend their days shooting rats on the river bank and only briefly look for work. The house is a heady cauldron of stew boiling over from all the deceit, yearning, sexual impropriety and parental wantonness. In many ways we could be in 1919 New England and watching Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms," what with all the heady, musty, suppressed sexuality on view here.
Director Joachim LaFosse has an excellent eye and the film is shot in the muted colors of a Renoir painting which proves to be an alluring counterpoint to the less than glamorous goings on in Chez Pascale.
Isabelle Huppert plays Pascale from the inside: on the one hand concerned, loving, maternal and on the other searching for ways to rid herself of her burdens and escape with her lover. Huppert, never one to shy away from working on screen without makeup when a role calls for it, looks like a 50 year old put upon, used up woman who has but one shred of a hope left in her body and that shred does not include Thierry or Jeremie who have bled her dry with their need for attention and care, demands for love and obnoxious shows of disrespect.
LaFosse and his screenwriter have some interesting things to say here but most have been said before: the perils of divorce, loving your children too much, the necessity of building and more to the point keeping your life though you are married...and so on. What elevates "Private Property" from the turgid melodramas of the `40's ("Mildred Pierce" for example) is the wondrous ensemble acting: the magnificent Huppert and the forceful and always interesting Renier brothers.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Real Tension Between These Characters, February 6, 2009
Private Property is an intense film. It explores relationships at their worst. There is a certain Bergman flavor to this film, mostly in the character development and the tight intimate shots.
A story most have heard, read, or seen many times, divorced parents, mother trying to fall in love and raise two adult children, and a father who has moved on to a new life. The film simmers along until the plot boils at the end. It's a bit predictible, but that is also it's charm. The most important aspect is the relationships these characters have. Thierry against his mother, Pascale (Huppert as the mother) with her lover and against her ex-husband, Thierry and his twin brother Francois, and about every other permutation imaginable. To watch these characters love then hate and love again is remarkable. I found myself hating Thierry more and more as the film wore on, he managed to insult everyone around him.
I was most impressed by Isabelle Huppert. I have been a fan of hers for so many years, starting in the late 80's. She seemed to have gone off a bit recently in La Pianiste and Merci Pour Le Chocolat. Something very amazing has happened to her in this film, a confidence, a sensuality, a beauty that I hadn't seen in a long time. She and Jérémie Renier as the evil twin Thierry are the real stars of this film.
The pacing was well near perfect. When we needed some time to understand or absorb what was happening, Joachim Lafosse took a few extra seconds with his edits. We spend a little more time watching two people sitting on a couch watching television (a common theme), it's just long enough to notice but not be bored. Framing choices were interesting. Frequently a shot would open with a static view of a doorway, a conversation would start and then the actors would move in to the frame. Just a reinforcement of boundaries. In general the camera work was excellent, all except the closing shot. This is a tracking shot that was clearly done on the cheap and quick from the back of a hatchback car and the cameraman sitting there. It's a rude ending to the film, which had such precision in framing and camera work.
Dialog was universally clear. There is a fair amount of French poking at the Flemish in Belgium. To my ear, the family is from Paris. Pascale, Thierry and Francois are French not Belgian. Pascale's chef boyfriend is clearly Flemish and has much trouble speaking French. This is also a dig that Thierry makes often, among many other insults. What could be translated, was translated in the subtitles fairly well.
The film is in French with English subtitles. As with most French cinema, there is no fear of nudity male or female or sensual scenes. These scenes fit within the film perfectly. There is a very odd scene of the twins, well into their 20's taking a bath together. There is nothing sexual about this scene, it appears that these two boys do this whenever it's time to take a bath. Barring the nudity, this is still an R rated movie. The intensity of the language and relationships really makes this film appropriate for that audience.
Overall, a very fine film.
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