Tender As Hellfire
Screened Saturday, October 10, 2009
Synopsis
Gabrielle is Patrice Chereau’s stunning adaptation of the short story “The Return” by Joesph Conrad. Recreating turn-of-the-century France with superb attention to detail, Chereau casts an unrelenting gaze on the marital breakdown that overwhelms a middle-aged bourgeois couple, played with chilling precision by Isabelle Hupert and Pascal Gregory. Chereau (La Reine Margot), his actors, and his wonderful cinematographer, Eric Gautier, take their material to dizzying and terrifying depths, and achieve and emotional grandeur worthy of the plays of August Strindberg and the films of Ingmar Bergman.
