The Widow of Saint-Pierre
With Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Emir Kusturica, Philippe Magnan, and Michel Duchaussoy.
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In any case, no one ought to assume that the only nonintellectual movies out there are the ones without subtitles. The recent smash success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon might open the door to some of the better entertainments from around the world, which deserve to be shown at the mall alongside Someone Like You. The Widow of Saint-Pierre, which opens this weekend at the Music Box, will probably be associated more with art or culture than with entertainment, chiefly because it’s in French with subtitles and it takes place during the mid-19th century. Yet its intellectual content isn’t any higher than that of Erin Brockovich or Traffic. Like those films, it’s stunted by the star system it’s built around. Here Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil–like Julia Roberts, Michael Douglas, and Ashley Judd–are used to distract us from whatever anomalies, contradictions, and inconsistencies the movie decides to sling at us.
The story, which is partially based on court records, is set during the French Second Republic on Saint Pierre, a French island off the coast of Newfoundland. Two drunken fishermen argue endlessly about whether their former captain is gras (fat) or gros (big), go to his cabin for fun and games, and wind up knifing him to death. The man who wielded the knife, Neel Auguste (played by the great Sarajevan film director Emir Kusturica, coaxed into acting by Leconte), is sentenced to be guillotined; his friend gets off with hard labor but is killed in an accident en route to the prison.
