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LA VIE PROMISE (THE PROMISED LIFE) Send This Review to a Friend
French actress Isabelle Huppert is a force to watch on screen in just about whatever movie in which she chooses to star. In the import "La Vie Promise" she plays Sylvia, a troubled woman whose depression after giving birth to a son resulted in hospitalization. She subsequently bolted from her husband and child and wound up working as a prostitute on the streets of Nice. We meet her when she is in trouble with pimps and faced with her 14-year-old daughter Laurence (Maud Forget), who has been in foster care but now wants to see her estranged mother. Sylvia wants none of the relationship and cruelly rejects the girl.
The film, directed by director Olivier Dahan, follows the mother-daughter relationship that develops after the daughter violently saves her mother's life and gets no thanks for it. The tone of the dialogue is tough, and there is nothing very likable about the self-centered way in which Sylvia behaves. Yet Dahan's style is much too gauzy and pretentious for the subject, with a strained effort at lyricism periodically undercutting the realism. Still, the adventures of Sylvia and Laurence become somewhat of a road movie and Huppert and Forget give compelling performances.
The story takes on added complexity when mother and daughter meet an enigmatic stranger named Joshua, played with a suggestion of danger about him by Pascal Greggory. He has a past from which he is fleeing, and he becomes a conduit in helping Sylvia on a journey to find the husband and child she abandoned. Meanwhile, she is forging a cautious relationship with Greggory, and the emotional needs of Laurence also come into play in her relationship with Greggory.
We don't get enough specifics about Sylvia's background, only suggestions to fill us in somewhat. It is difficult to see how she would wind up hooking. We have to accept this and root for her to pull her life together, and get closer to Laurence. Can there be a happy ending?
Huppert is unsentimental to say the least in the portrait that she provides of Sylvia, save for one sequence in which we can feel for her. While Sylvia may not be a likable character, as usual the actress is fascinating to watch, and she looks very different here as a blonde. If the film didn't try so self-consciously to be arty, it would have been improved, and most audiences would want more explanations of Sylvia's life before we met her. An Empire Pictures release.
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