Good start, but then it gets ruined

Better Late Then Never

A Brilliant Conflict

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Imagine for a moment that you're director, Régis Wargnier. You've made a thoroughly wonderful (if a bit slow) movie "Indochine" in 1992 and, of course, you've seen Claude Berri's "Jean de Florette" and "Manon des Sources". You know that Daniel Auteuil and Emmanualle Beart have worked wonderfully together before. Now, what shall I do?I know, I'll put Daniel and Emmanuelle back together in a romantic story with some nice scenery thrown in and hope it works again. Wrong!!Louis (Auteuil) spent almost the entire movie going off to fight in some theatre of war that was never quite clear, always it seemed to help the frogs maintain colonial control over some poor far off group of peasants. We all know how successful they were during WWII, during the campaign in Vietnam and later in Algeria. Poor old Louis was never destined for success was he? Nonetheless, it appears that he progressed through the French ranks.His wife, Jeanne, (Beart), seems to have spent her whole life in and out of love with Louis or any of a dozen other lovers it appears. She seems to have suffered from a life-long inability to stay upright in the presence of any man she even vaguely fancied."Une Femme Francaise" may not be the very worst movie I've ever seen but, trust me, it was bloody close. I really wanted to like this movie after having watched and loved JdF and MdS many, many times but this load of old merde was way beyond the tolerance of my inbuilt "merde-omer".The script was riddled with clichés, utterly predictable and some of the scenes that were supposed to be serious or romantic or both were just laughably awful. The acting, even from Auteuil and Beart, was wooden and quite unconvincing.I have rarely been so incredibly disappointed by what might have been a good movie. This was just terrible tripe and there's no way I will ever watch it again. I am glad I got the DVD for next to nothing.JMV

Jeanne meets Louis as he is preparing to go to his brother's wedding, but fate intervenes as his father suffers a heart attack and the ceremony is postponed. A year later a double wedding takes place, one in which Jeanne and Louis are married in the ceremony together with his brother and bride. It is the outset of WWII in France. Louis, a military man, must go to the front and he is taken prisoner to a camp. While Jeanne awaits his return, she begins an affair with Henri, a comrade of Louis. It is clear Jeanne unhappiness is assuaged easily.After the war, Louis is posted to Berlin, where living conditions are poor. Bringing Jeanne along, they are housed with an impoverished industrialist and his son, Mattias. Jeanne is clearly attracted by the German man and they begin an affair that will put her marriage in jeopardy. Louis, finding out about her infidelity, even questions the paternity of his children, a doubt that will consume him forever.The director, Regis Wargnier, supposedly based the film on his own mother's life. It is curious, and at the same time, courageous for anyone to examine a life of a woman that showed no respect for the man she married and for her own family. Yet, the story is quite hard to take because of the nature of a lady that shows no redeeming qualities to speak of. The screenplay was written by the director and Alain LeHenry. As DBDumontiel points out in his commentary, Mr. Wargnier seems to be influenced by Douglas Sirk. His Jeanne is an ambivalent woman whose own libido takes over the better part of her.Emmanuelle Beart, a ravishing creature, shows an understanding for the woman she is playing. Daniel Auteuil is Louis the deceived husband that always returned to the woman that had no regard for him, or her family. Gabriel Barylli appears as Mattias, the German lover. He makes an impression as the tormented man passionately in love with another man's wife. The only reason for watching the film is because of the presence of Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Beart.

A FRENCH WOMAN was advertised as the story of a woman drifting between desire and convention on a journey of self discovery but to me it was an attempt by the Director/ Narrator to glorify and exonerate his mother's (=main protagonist) intrinsic sluttishness and huge egos leading to multiple infidelities. Compared to the other great French woman in the movie A VERY LONG ENGEGEMENT, who, against all odds, embarks on a relentless, painful, long and often frustrating ordeal to find out the truth about her supposedly dead boyfriend, the protagonist in this movie would be seen as nothing worse than a sluttish whore.First, after her husband comes back from the war, he correctly says to her," we are not heroes and you are a whore". Then she says "take me wherever you go, I have so much love to give you". After her husband forgives her and accepts her excuse for having multiple affairs with numerous men (instead of one affair with one man if she is a woman who believes in true love and not lust and sex) as "to give me the strength to keep going on", she goes on and bears the infant twins her husband does not father and she breaks her promise and has an affair with a German industrialist in Berlin.Then when the German lover tells her that he wants a family with kids and does not want to wait anymore for her and just becomes her sexual lover, she becomes cool and tells her son, "He is a nobody" when her son asks her who the man is.Then after the lover leaves her, she has multiple affairs with other men again until her death.I am sure if she leaves her husband and marries the German boyfriend, she will have affairs with other men again. As the saying goes, "once a whore, always a whore".So I think the movie should glorify the poor husband's greatness in repeatedly forgiving her, taking her back despite her numerous infidelities, treating the twins like his own, staying in the marriage for the sake of their children and telling friends that the big scar at the back of his back is from a shot in the war with the Vietnamese enemy instead of from his own wife, doing that in an attempt to save her German lover from being bashed to death by him.I am sure few men in the world can be as forgiving as her husband to a constantly unfaithful wife.At the end of the movie, the narrator states, "That day, Loius wondered whether it was love that killed Jeanne." I would call it lust and sluttishness not love and I feel sympathy for Louis and admire his greatness as a husband and father and I feel nothing but disgust and sadness for the Director's efforts to portray the egoistic sluttish woman's infidelities as self discovery.

Although based on the Director's memories of his own mother by giving it the title he has it's hard to figure out if he is 1) disillusioned with all French women and is 2) insinuating that French women as a sub-gender are, to a woman, incapable of fidelity and/or whores. The logical question we, as viewers, ask ourselves is why didn't Auteuil leave the army after World War 11, given that his wife had been unfaithful whilst he was a POW. Instead, he forgives her and promptly dashes off to another war leaving her to do the same thing again. Okay, if it's a true story he doesn't want to fictionalize if for the sake of logic and presumably he never asked his father that question. These carps to one side this remains a well-written and well-acted film.