ANAIS DEMOUSTIER AND BRUNO TODESCHINI IN BE WISE

Soft hints and portents

Shown as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center Film Comment Selects, Be Wise/Soi sage maintains the series' reputation for blending elegance and edginess. Juliette Garcia's first feature, shown in February in FCS, scheduled for mid-April April release in France, is beautiful-looking, very quiet -- thoroughly weird. The fine camerawork is set off by silence, the rustle of trees, and piano passages. There's something hypnotic about the film and, eventually, disquieting.

The focus is on a rather distant young woman called Nathalie, who's taken a summer job at a remote village as a baker's delivery person. She tells everyone here her name is Eve, and for good reason. She doesn't want her presence yet to be known to Jean, a pianist and a married man with whom she has had an affair, who lives here.

A Zen-like calm pervades the early sequences of Be Wise/Sois sage. Natalie/Eve watches the young baker kneading bread. The camera seems to move silently through a green shade, like a stalker -- which is what Eve in a sense is. The quiet doesn't seem artificial. It fits with the stillness of a region that's warm and verdant but sparsely populated. Eve's job, which she plunges into without needing guidance, is to drive a small panel truck around the countryside delivering various-shaped loaves of the bakery's products to local households and collect money for them. The French dedication to making freshly baked artisanal bread available at all hours appears to be alive and well.

Anaïs Demoustier, the young but very assured actress who plays Nathalie/Eve, has the right kind of face, enigmatic, seeming to hide secret knowledge. She is both girlish and womanly. She lurks. She reveals nothing. She's friendly, but when approached, she pulls back. That goes for any men she encounters. She gives them a come-hither look, or even spends time with a young stranger by a river, but when approached, says she has a boyfriend. She keeps telling lies, which don't cohere, except to tell us that she's haunted. Sometimes we hear piano music. We get glimpses of Jean's life, and we see two sets of hands on a keyboard without knowing whose they are. Other characters emerge, people Eve gets to know doing her job.

That job seems to give her ready access to people's properties and houses. She walks up to them when they're asleep. She acquires an instant intimacy, without ceasing to be enigmatic. Without Jean's prior knowledge, even after he has run into her, she babysits his child. Already she has come to seem haunted and strange. It's never fully certain what the relationship was, but it appears to be something not at all normal. Garcias' style is extremely suspenseful, the mood verges on the horror genre, yet the effect is quite individual. Uncertainties that remain at the end seem quite calculated. This is a mood piece and a think piece that blends bizarre sexuality, obsession, and pastoral reverie. This is Fatal Attraction filtered through the sensibility of Catherine Breillat, done in a third style that we're now discovering.

Be Wise may not be for the general audience because it defeats genre expectations. Its slow, at times almost glacial, pace requires patience and won't work unless you give yourself up fully to the visuals. But these are lush. Indeed the film's beauty and self-assurance, despite its oddity, may point to US art house release. It's certainly an original and promising piece of work with a feminine point of view and it makes skillful use of image, ambient sound, and location to build its mood.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.