Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu, two of France's greatest living actors, are the leads in a film by Guillaume Nicloux called Valley of Love. It's a terrible title, a literal translation from the French, La Vallee de l'Amour , which sounds very much like La Vallee de la Mort (Death Valley), and since this takes place in Death Valley, a better translation would be Love Valley, except that sounds like Love Alley, which is not at all the desired tone. The idea is, "Death is the Valley of Love." You can contemplate such verities when you go see it, starting this Friday, April 29, at the Roxie Theater.
The film is beautifully shot, on location, in breathtaking scenery with a life of its own, counterpoised against American amenities such as a rustic inn, swimming pool, sprinklers. The concept of Huppert and Depardieu, two titans, meeting in Furnace Creek for an existential road movie is delicious, but they never become coy, camp, or cliche. The screenplay is quirky, keeping the audience off-balance, waiting for the next move, constantly surprised by small touches and quick edits out of scenes left unfinished and yet somehow complete. The telling of the tale is masterful and delightful.
The tale itself is a bit odd, a bit metaphysical, spiritualist, and uncanny. These two actors play actors who were married and who lost a son to suicide. Before he died, he wrote them each a letter, asking them to "meet him" in Death Valley on such and such a day. They drop everything and come to the rendezvous. The film focuses on them, moment to moment, as they reconnect and rediscover what they loved about each other and what they didn't. The performances are intimate, truthful, without veneer. Depardieu is particularly impressive in the immediacy of his no-nonsense, commonsense Everyman responses to a trippy situation.
Somewhere along the line, the film snags on the conventions of genre. Is it a road trip? Yes. A relationship film? Yes. A film about the paranormal, or the blurry line between emotional and physical states? Yes. When the end comes, I regret to say I was unprepared, having not followed along where the writer-director wanted to take me. I didn't reject the ending so much as fail to understand it. The ending is fatalistic, and Huppert has made a career of fatal endings, so I should've seen it coming, except I was distracted by Depardieu's relative buoyancy.
The death of a child is famously difficult to recover from. The French here pay grief the tribute of not cooking up a maudlin ending for bereaved divorced parents. Their lives have gone on, but they've never forgiven themselves, which is why, in desperation, they keep this date with their dead son. Or is the outlandish promise that he will somehow appear to them merely a fabrication by Isabelle, a ruse to lure Gerard into a meeting not designed to heal either of them? That's the reasonable explanation for what feels like an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending.
The denouement, startling and quick, lands somewhere between psychic and psychotic, but I'm not sure the ending is the point of the film. Getting to watch these two inject Frenchified passion into a National Park resort illuminates the familiar tropes of coffee shop and baseball cap. Valley of Love is best seen as an assemblage of charged exchanges between two profound comedians, between them and the death-dealing landscape, and between Death Valley and all the random humans who show up to hike, swim, or more deeply challenge themselves in this game we're forced to play with life and death, love and loss.