The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

So many negative reviews, esp the Metacritic reviews! What movie were they watching? Guess it is a love/hate kind of movie.Tour de force acting by all. This could have easily turned melodramatic in other hands, esp with Gabrielle's state of mind, but Marion Cotillard's acting skills worked a wonder, as did Nicole Garcia's directing. A beautiful, if melancholic, love story. Gorgeous locations and photography, in the Alps and by the sea. The sound was spectacular and nominated for a Cesar award. It seemed like the ambiance was recorded while filming, instead of the usual Foley artists coming in to re-create the sound later. I think they did Foley some things, like footsteps, but the important scenes were recorded live. That is so rare; I felt like I was there, as I was when younger. If I am wrong, then outstanding Foley work! The music was perfect for the mood. Wow, I didn't even realize it was so long. It never felt like it. Sparse dialog and much of the film is done via feelings. When that is done so well it is truly a treat not many can pull off. Be sure and catch all the dialog, though, or you may not get it. I tried to guess what 'twist' could possibly happen, as I had read some reviews and knew there was one, but I was wrong (although mine was a good one!). It is rare to be fooled by a film these days! I feel strangely uplifted just now after watching this film, for some odd reason. Perhaps it is that I feel like I have just had a trip to Europe, or I was so immersed it was truly an escape and a journey. Enjoy!

I watched this at home on DVD from my local library. My wife skipped, she doesn't enjoy reading subtitles. It is mostly in French and I watched it with English subtitles.I got the movie mainly because it features Marion Cotillard. She is a lovely lady and one of the best actresses of the current generation. Here she is Gabrielle, part of a farming family in France that includes her dad and mom, plus a younger sister. We see that she was difficult growing up, what some may call "mean." And also fixated on nudity and sex. Looking like she might never marry, her parents made a deal with one of the workers, a Mr. Rabascal, if he would marry her then they would help set him up with his own masonry business. He agrees, Gabrielle eventually goes along, but she tells him directly that she will never love him and they will not have husband-wife relations. In her magnanimity she tells him she doesn't mind if he goes into the city to hire a prostitute.I will not say much more except to say it is mainly a character study of Gabrielle, how she deals with her difficult personality, in the end trying to achieve some happiness with her husband and son who has a gift for playing the piano.Marion Cotillard is superb.

Gabrielle, a stunning embodiment of 1950s Provence hysteria in full HD, yearns, craves and longs. Her oozing desire is disruptive to those around her and excruciatingly painful for her to bear, pushing her into silently abundant jouissance beyond words, which passes through her body in cramps of both pain and pleasure. Bearing such free-floating desire in turn makes Gabrielle barren - her wandering womb (the ancient Greek explanation for hysteria) refuses to stay attached to one place and nurture a fetus, conceived in what Gabrielle perceives a loveless marriage with Jose.Diagnosed with kidney stones as the scientific explanation for her ailments, Gabrielle is subsequently sent off to a mountain resort, one with uncanny ability to dive into the hemispheres of the unconscious mind, strangely resembling Mann's Magic Mountain, thus allowing Gabrielle to spill her desire over reality itself, over time and memory as she meets a charming young man, physically and emotionally absent enough for her to project her longing onto him, for him to play a phantasmatic figure in her own monodrama of Wuthering Heights. She can finally live her jouissance fully and completely by bringing her unconscious phantasies to life as the object of these phantasies, on the other hand, slips into death. The love scene portraying the perfect union comes to stand for a breathtaking example of how the mechanisms of trauma, repression and narcissistic loss (melancholia) work. The trauma of loss (not of the man Gabrielle thought she had loved, but of her own narcissistic self in and with his death) becomes repressed and another scene happens in Gabrielle's mind instead, which secures linearity of Gabrielle's historic self. She can only come to decipher this event years later via the narrative of the silent Jose, whose silences had been nurturing silent gaps in Gabrielle's memory until she was finally ready to bear them. Until she was finally ready for a dialogue. Until she was finally ready to hear Jose speak his story. This film is a remarkable narrative of a ruthless abundance of feminine desire that longs for a language to speak itself, and take ownership of the ambivalent continuity of self, which is all but linear. Cotillard is exquisite in this role, and so is the cinematographic gaze following movements of her wandering/wuthering womb.

'From the Land of the Moon' tells the tale of Gabrielle (Marion Cotillard) who develops an unfortunate - and unreciprocated - sexual obsession with her local teacher in 1950s rural France. Her mother hastily arranges for her to be married off to itinerant Spanish workman José (Alex Brendemühl), who can not even be bothered shaving for their wedding day. Gabrielle resigns herself to a loveless marriage - charging José 200 francs for sex - before she has to stay at a Swiss spa to be treated for 'stones sickness' (not, as you might think, an obsession with Mick Jagger et al, but kidney stones). At the spa she meets aristocratic soldier André (Louis Garrel), with whom she develops a deep (though, to her disappointment, platonic) relationship. But when André leaves and Gabrielle returns to José, how will her experiences have changed her?I spent much of the film trying to work out how old Gabrielle is supposed to be: when the film opens the story suggests she is the equivalent of a sixth form student, but Cotillard, in her forties, hardly looks the part. In other respects, though, she is perfect, conveying with the minimum of fuss Gabrielle's undercurrent of frustration with her lot in life - and the look she gives the man with whom she has ended up in the film's very last shot speaks volumes. Brendemühl and Garrel are pretty much Cotillard's supporting players (after all, neither of *them* has an Oscar!) but both make the most of their parts, again without resorting to over-acting.Subtlety is the watchword in setting the film's period, too: director Nicole Garcia choosing to express it with costumes, interior decorations and cars, rather than beating the viewer around the head with pop songs from the time as other directors might be tempted to do. There no big explosions, no screeching-wheeled car chases; this is simply a film about human emotions - and contains a twist I certainly did not see coming. Well worth a viewing.