Gabrielle.

"Relationship dramas can rarely be described as spooky, but Gabrielle, like Conrad's story, is a bona-fide creepshow, complete with scaremonger 'jumps' of the horror variety." Leah Churner leads Reverse Shot's round on Patrice Chéreau's latest at indieWIRE.

For the AV Club's Scott Tobias, it's "a bravura exercise in shifting power dynamics, punctuated by bold stylistic touches such as jolting cuts from color to black-and-white, dramatic swells in the classical score, and screen-spanning intertitles that serve as exclamation points to several key scenes. In Chéreau's hands, Gabrielle has an operatic quality that throws the repressive environment into sharp relief; the film works like a pressure cooker, seething with bottled passions that intermittently burst through with startling cruelty and violence."

In the Voice, Dennis Lim calls it "a stunning reinvention of the period chamber drama."

Updated through 7/14.

Related: "Who knew July was French cinema month?" asks Anthony Kaufman in an entry following up on his piece for indieWIRE.

Updates, 7/14: A "film of eccentric beauty and wild feeling," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Chéreau's "theater background may help account for the consistently fine acting in his films, while his staging of Wagner may explain the wonderful fearlessness with which he embraces melodramatic excess."

For Steve Erickson, writing in Gay City News, Gabrielle "has more in common with Ingmar Bergman than Merchant-Ivory. Paradoxically but excitingly, it brings a rare degree of immediacy to a story that reminds us that the past is a foreign country."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "I found it a haunting and riveting work, unlike anything else you can see at the movies and as such an explicit challenge to the unambitious, anesthetic character of most contemporary cinema. But is it easy, or delightful, or fun? It is not."

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic: "So much of this adaptation is engrossing that the script's additions are jarring... These interpolations, though they can just possibly be mined out of Conrad, still smack of movie-making."

"Not just another movie," offers Armond White in the New York Press, "it's an experiment in how movies depict relationships and emotion, testing the means by which movies become art."

For the Nation's Stuart Klawans, "the force of Gabrielle lies in the faces."

Online listening tip. Chéreau on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at July 12, 2006 3:49 PM