My Favorite Season

Andre Techine’s complex, haunting, and luminous 1993 film considers the complications of family love across three generations, especially the unrequited love between a middle-aged sister and brother (Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil), neurotic overachievers whose mother (Marthe Villalonga), an illiterate farm widow, is approaching death. A longtime disciple of Ingmar Bergman, Techine views intense emotions from the inside out, freely cutting between the reality and the fantasies of his characters in a way that suggests Persona; this is a movie about imponderables, which means that not everything about the characters is spelled out or sewn up by the end. All the actors are powerful (including Jean-Pierre Bouvier, Carmen Chaplin, and Deneuve’s daughter Chiara Mastroianni), but Deneuve’s performance is a revelation. Pascal Bonitzer — who has long collaborated with Jacques Rivette and Raul Ruiz — worked with Techine on the script. In French with subtitles. 127 min. (JR)

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