Serious Friends

AS THE FILM Entre Nous concludes with the French seashore at dusk, we observe the scene from the perspective of a small girl who is standing on the porch of a beachhouse watching her parents complete the breakup of their ailing marriage. She is the unnoticed observer; slightly confused at the complex adult world, but completely engrossed. The viewer experiences a similar response to Diane Kury's new film--a film that thrusts the viewer into the intricate emotional life of its character's lives, but occasionally leaves them standing alone.

Entre Nous, the official French entry for the Academy Awards, is a film that examines the close relationship of two women who meet at their children's elementary school play in Lyon in 1952. Unlike Personal Best, where the relationship between the two women is distinctly physical and the film The Turning Point, where the women share a strictly platonic relationship. Kury does not explicate the nature of the protagonists' relationship, but rather leaves Madeline and Lena's friendship ambiguous.

Their first meeting, however, hints at a decidely physical attraction. As they sit together on a bench in the empty school auditorium. Lena suddenly reaches down to touch her leg, noticing that she has ripped her stocking. Looking at Madeline's bare legs she quips, "You're bare-legged." Madeline explains that she is wearing suntan lotion, and rubs her leg, asking Lena to smell her hand. In this first meeting of two soon to be friends the viewer wonders why Kury has chosen to initiate their friendship with such a decisively physical scene.

Yet this rather intimate moment also describes one of the compelling forces in the two women's close friendship. Madeline is, in a sense, the bare legged or liberated of the two, while Lena is enveloped in the world of domesticity; a world which Made line begins to show her is limiting and stifling.

Entire Nous, like Kury's first film Peppermint Soda, is distinctly autobiographical. Peppermint Soda was a lovely, sensitive portrayal of her childhood in France. Entre Nous describes the breakdown of her parent's marriage, and the second woman who, in a sense, took her father's place.

The film opens as Lena (Isabelle Huppert), a Belgian Jew and character based on Kury's mother, enters a detention camp during WWII. She is allowed to leave by agreeing to marry Michel, also a Jew (Guy Machard). Together they escape to Italy. At the same time in German occupied France, Madeline (Miou-Miou) weds a fellow art student who soon after is murdered by the Nazis.

When we meet the two women 10 years later in Lyon, Madeline has remarried--this time to an unsuccessful actor and equally unsuccessful seller of dubious goods--Costa (Jean Pierre Bacri). In contrast to Madeline who has maintained her own artistic sphere, Lena has managed to turn her hurried marriage into a comfortable middle-class world of childcare with her husband Michel, a now-successful garage owner.

KURY SENSITIVELY describes the complex needs and pleasures that draw Lena and Madeline to each other. They seem to receive a warmth missing from each of their marriages, while at the same time the bond provides the support for both women to move outside their secure, almost static, worlds. For Madeline, it is to leave her bumbling husband, while for Lena, it is to feel capable of venturing outside of her house.

In the France of the 1950s, the domestic world was the accepted, indeed expected, environment for women. Madeline and Lena function almost as a unit in helping each other to explore the world outside. Kury highlights the strength of the women's friendship by subtly contrasting it to the friendship that develops between Costa and Michel. While Michel and Costa vie for the attention of each others' wives on a joint family outing, Michel tells Madeline. "You only look at Lena, never at me." And while each husband tries to trick the other into phony business deals, Lena and Madeline remain loyal friends. Kury, however, does not idealize the relationship between Lena and Madeline. Rather, she depicts their competitiveness and occasional selfishness in an almost comic manner, making the film a realistic portrayal of friendship.

Huppert maintains a consistently powerful presence throughout the film, providing the more stable thoughtful facet of the seemingly inseparable pair. Miou, as the more flighty impulsive Madeline, delivers a performance that combines an almost childlike impulsiveness and love for adventure with an almost preoccupied, melancholy air.

Kury's characters become the central focus of the film, while the background tends to reflect the mood or mindset of the principles. When Lena and Madeline spend a day exploring Lyon for a site to start their dress shop, Lyon looks like a muted painting with pastel buildings and pale skies, invoking the almost dreamlike quality of the day. When Lena's child gets left behind during the excursion, the audience is thrust back into the really of material responsibility as Lena and Madeline pace around the seemingly stark interior of Lena's home. Kury never diverts the audience's attention from her three-dimensional characters. In doing so, she never lets us down, nor does the films small cast of strong actors.

Although Kury's intentions are sometimes obscured, particularly in the relationship between the two women, her film does not ultimately suffer. The actors and actresses maintain a credible tone in presenting personal conflicts and small joys of daily life.