TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

sfviewer123 Everyone seems to think that the wife was either a whore and the husband a hero or she was driven to it by loneliness (and the husband is still a hero)...I didn't see it either way, both are too black and white.For one we never really saw her loneliness I didn't think, plus she kept cheating on him even when he was back sometimes IIRC. Also she was out of control, and unable to commit one way or the other to either her husband or her lover.I thought the film was about two people with psychoemotional problems who stayed together simply because they were too afraid to separate...the husband's service seemed parasuicidal for example, and his family seemed to realize how unstable she was but he stuck with her (loyalty is not always a virtue).If the film was meant to be autobiographical then perhaps the director was stuck with certain plot developments? Or maybe his point was that the first experience of emotional deprivation was so scarring that it created a life-long pattern that would have not been there otherwise? But I think if she died because of a broken heart, even metaphorically, it meant from the get-go that she was torn between "desire and duty", i.e. a marriage to a respectable and appropriate partner and the person her heart and body desired. A little unclear but that is par for the course for French films in my experience, they are meant to provoke thought and discussion (unlike most American ones). Also I did not understand the title, unless the director was saying this is the emotional reality for most French women, for that generation or in general.P.S. I was also glad there was no nudity in the film. It would have been a cheap attempt at interjecting eroticism into the film IMO, such things can be inferred implicitly by adults.

B LAW A FRENCH WOMAN was advertised as the story of a woman drifting between desire and convention on a journey of self discovery but to me it was an attempt by the Director/ Narrator to glorify and exonerate his mother's (=main protagonist) intrinsic sluttishness and huge egos leading to multiple infidelities. Compared to the other great French woman in the movie A VERY LONG ENGEGEMENT, who, against all odds, embarks on a relentless, painful, long and often frustrating ordeal to find out the truth about her supposedly dead boyfriend, the protagonist in this movie would be seen as nothing worse than a sluttish whore.First, after her husband comes back from the war, he correctly says to her," we are not heroes and you are a whore". Then she says "take me wherever you go, I have so much love to give you". After her husband forgives her and accepts her excuse for having multiple affairs with numerous men (instead of one affair with one man if she is a woman who believes in true love and not lust and sex) as "to give me the strength to keep going on", she goes on and bears the infant twins her husband does not father and she breaks her promise and has an affair with a German industrialist in Berlin.Then when the German lover tells her that he wants a family with kids and does not want to wait anymore for her and just becomes her sexual lover, she becomes cool and tells her son, "He is a nobody" when her son asks her who the man is.Then after the lover leaves her, she has multiple affairs with other men again until her death.I am sure if she leaves her husband and marries the German boyfriend, she will have affairs with other men again. As the saying goes, "once a whore, always a whore".So I think the movie should glorify the poor husband's greatness in repeatedly forgiving her, taking her back despite her numerous infidelities, treating the twins like his own, staying in the marriage for the sake of their children and telling friends that the big scar at the back of his back is from a shot in the war with the Vietnamese enemy instead of from his own wife, doing that in an attempt to save her German lover from being bashed to death by him.I am sure few men in the world can be as forgiving as her husband to a constantly unfaithful wife.At the end of the movie, the narrator states, "That day, Loius wondered whether it was love that killed Jeanne." I would call it lust and sluttishness not love and I feel sympathy for Louis and admire his greatness as a husband and father and I feel nothing but disgust and sadness for the Director's efforts to portray the egoistic sluttish woman's infidelities as self discovery.

writers_reign Although based on the Director's memories of his own mother by giving it the title he has it's hard to figure out if he is 1) disillusioned with all French women and is 2) insinuating that French women as a sub-gender are, to a woman, incapable of fidelity and/or whores. The logical question we, as viewers, ask ourselves is why didn't Auteuil leave the army after World War 11, given that his wife had been unfaithful whilst he was a POW. Instead, he forgives her and promptly dashes off to another war leaving her to do the same thing again. Okay, if it's a true story he doesn't want to fictionalize if for the sake of logic and presumably he never asked his father that question. These carps to one side this remains a well-written and well-acted film.

Bethy-3 This is Regis Wargnier's memories about his mother. We can see him as a boy, sharing moments of joy and blues. Emmanulle Beart was criticized for playing the part of Jeanne, a woman that could not remain faithful to her husband, always in the war. The loneliness was the reason of the unfaithfulness. Daniel Auteuil is unforgettable as the patient husband always forgiving the wife's sins.Beautiful...sensitive and highly recommended