Le piège d'Issoudun (2003) User Reviews

Lanctôt is not too late

[prohibited-name-1142 · 23 February 2004]

Micheline Lanctôt is not your average overproductive director. When she works on a script, she does it seriously, and doesn't let it down until she's satisfied. Mostly an actress over the last ten years, she came back as a director with LE PIÈGE D'ISSOUDUN.

Set over the course of one quiet winter day, it begins with a sober but shocking scene, after which a torn mother tries to kill herself on the highway, but fails as she gets pulled over by a cop. What could have been a simple routine task for the cop soon evolves into a weird relationship; when he sees that the lady's visibly disturbed, he tries to help her and understand what's going on.

Intersped with scenes from a Grimm play that deals with matricide, this movie is built in a subtle tone, and its contemplative nature adds a certain beauty to the "horror" of the initial situation. Frédérick De Grandpré and Sylvie Drapeau are well chosen for this dramatic duel, cast as the father & mother that are both separated from their children in different ways.

This is in no way a "family" movie, but it's powerful and dramatic, and deserves to be seen.

Tragic meeting of two broken family survivors

[maurice_yacowar · 8/10 · 1 May 2024]

To my regret, I lost touch with the work of Quebec actor/director Micheline Lanctot after her wonderful Handyman (1980) and Sonatine (1984). Happily, a dvd sale just produced The Juniper Tree, which she wrote, edited and directed. She also provided the music. It's a wonderful reunion.

Lanctot's familiar theme of two sensitive souls meeting across obstacles of class and culture here gets an operatic rendition. The film opens with a poetic reverie - both in word and in abstract imagery - about the savagery of archetypal motherhood. It closes on an operatic summation. In between we get two very dramatic stories about families fractured by passions and loss.

Lanctot intercuts a two-hand melodrama with an opulent fairytale production of a typically grim Grimm fairy tale. In the titular tale a stepmother beheads her rejected stepson and is eventually killed by the singing bird that has revived the boy's spirit. A macabre story of fatal passions finds a happy miracle.

In the main plot a maddened mother drowns her two young sons and is saved from a motor suicide by a highway patrolman. But he is as riven as she is. He's a reformed commune hippy who has found stability and purpose as a cop. But that career choice cost him his hippy wife and access to their two young sons. He deals with the maddened strange mother en route to visiting his sons to explain why he's gone. The brief encounter compels him to transcend his professional legality. This is itself an ending of fairytale extremity.

Leads Sylvie Drapeau and Frederick de Grandpre are unfortunately unknown to me, as I have drifted from Quebec cinema. But they are both excellent.

Wonderful to see the artist Lanctot at her sustained peak.