Marion Cotillard illuminates Nicole Garcia's The Stones [critique]

Nicole Garcia signs a beautiful classical melodrama carried by an impressive Cotillard.

This Wednesday evening, Arte is banking on drama Stone Paindirected by Nicole Garcia, with Marion Cotillard, Louis Garrel and Alex Brendemühl. What is this adaptation of Milena Agus' novel, released in 2016 in theaters, worth? Here is our review.

The story of Stone Pain : Gabrielle grew up in the agricultural lower middle class where her dream of absolute passion caused a scandal. At a time when women were primarily destined for marriage, she was a nuisance, people thought she was crazy. Her parents gave her to José, a seasonal worker, who was tasked with making her a respectable woman. Gabrielle said she didn't love him, and saw herself buried alive. When she was sent to a spa to treat her kidney stones, her kidney stones, a lieutenant wounded in the Indochina War, André Sauvage, rekindled in her this urgency to love. They would flee together, she swore to herself, and he seemed to respond to her desire. This time, they wouldn't take from her what she called “the main thing”. Gabrielle wants to follow her dream…

The criticism of First : We had a feeling about it when the Cannes selection was announced in May 2016: Stone Pain would be the great movie “French quality” of the Competition with all the qualities and defects that this entails. Let's get rid of the defects, which are few: a certain prettiness in the staging, more illustrative than anything else; a slight lack of vertigo and viscerality. For the rest, Nicole Garcia fulfills with honors the specifications assigned to her, namely respecting the rules of the crazy film (presentation of the “wrong”blacklisting, confinement, possibility of escape) since that is what it is all about.

From the portrait of a young woman who is desperately romantic (exalted, hysterical, erotomaniac or hypersensitive, it works too) who loses herself in a quest for impossible love, the one she feels for a soldier she met in the spa where she is treated for kidney stones. Knowing that this Gabrielle was forcibly married to a silent Spaniard she does not love, the dramatic stakes are high and wrapped up with an equal concern for accuracy and depth.

Indispensable Cotillard
Present from the first to the last shot, Marion Cotillard is the main attraction of Stone Pain. The French star, who is fond of ambiguous and wildly nuanced roles, is served: wild, taciturn, resigned, passionate, lost, the Gabrielle she plays joins Edith, Marie, Ewa, Stéphanie or Sandra in the pantheon of her great performances full of breaks. She does not, however, eclipse her male partners who, despite more withdrawn roles, fully exist on screen. Louis Garrel (the soldier), with an unprecedented sobriety, perfectly embodies a form of ultimate male fantasy against which Gabrielle's dreams of the absolute come to collide. As for Alex Brendemühl (the husband), he plays perhaps the most thankless role in the film and the most rewarding at the same time. His silent and wholehearted love for Gabrielle takes on an unexpected dimension during the surprising – although a little overdone – denouement which puts his character into perspective, much thicker than one would have thought.

Trailer :

Louis Garrel is really very funny