Suzanna Andler (Benoit Jacquot, 2021) (Patreon)

There's a true-life legend among my cinephile crowd, involving a screening at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. A friend, who is not a professional critic but can more than hold his own in terms of obscure art cinema, went to see Platform, Jia Zhangke's second film and the one that pretty much established him as world cinema's Next Big Thing. My friend, however, was unimpressed, and decided to walk out. After close to an hour, with nothing else on his schedule, he decided to duck back into Platform. After a brief period, he was annoyed all over again and left for good. So essentially, our pal Ryan walked out of Platform twice in the same day.

I mention this because I first tried watching Suzanna Andler back in January 2021. It was screening at Rotterdam, and I had web access to the festival. After about 30 minutes, I'd decided that it wasn't for me. It's an adaptation of a Duras play, and Jacquot seemed to be doing very little to expand on it. Neither painfully restrained like Duras' own films, nor enlivened by slightly more expressionistic camerawork, Suzanna Andler looked to be an endless series of two-shots featuring Charlotte Gainsbourg (doing some of her least interesting work as an actor) and co-star Niels Schneider, waxing elliptical about their thwarted love affair.

Fast forward to November, when Suzanna Andler is added to the Ovid streaming service, which I subscribe to. Sometimes when I am watching too many films in a short amount of time (e.g., a film festival), I can't afford them the patience they require, so I decided to give it another look. I ended up watching the same 30 minutes as before, and turning it off. But between then and last week, a funny thing happened. I learned that Dan Sallitt, the director and former film critic, really likes Suzanna Andler a lot. Although Dan and I often want different things from films -- Rohmer and Pialat are his lodestars; my tastes run more toward the painterly -- I never take his recommendations lightly. Even when I dislike a film that Dan's a fan of, I feel like it's a clarifying kind of dislike. Following Dan's peculiar cinephilia is always worthwhile.

So I went back again to Suzanna Andler, this time seeing it through to the end. I will say, the first third does not provide a full picture of what Jacquot is up to. The second act finds Suzanna (Gainsbourg) leaving the villa on the Riviera and walking along the coast, having a long al fresco conversation with Monique (Julia Roy), the realtor who leased her the villa and, we learn, the former lover of Suzanna's playboy industrialist husband. The camera moves quite a bit in this scene, strongly suggesting a freedom in nature that contrasts with Suzanna's imprisonment indoors. The third act returns to the stifling room, however, with Suzanna and Michel (Schneider) employing Duras' trademark dialogue -- clipped, yet orotund -- to chart the dissolution of their affair. It was worth seeing, I suppose, but as a study of psychological misdirection -- bourgeois avatars speaking about what they will not do, only to mostly do it anyway -- it was indeed more frustrating than edifying.