Director: Philippe Claudel
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 1.0
Kristen Scott Thomas is … Despondent! Fresh out of a prison stint for "murdering" her six year old son, a former doctor (Thomas, au France) goes to live with her younger sister and brother-in-law and their adopted kids, and attempts to get her life started again. It's awkwardly-constructed and frankly repetitive drama: I wish I was exaggerating, but virtually every scene involves some kind of mention of prisons or murderers or something like that, which makes either someone cry or Thomas look even more depressed, only to move to another scene in which the same thing occurs. They're at a zoo and someone mentions how sad it is for animals to be 'locked up.' The younger sister and her husband want to go to movies, but then realize they don't trust Thomas' character alone with their adopted children. Thomas goes for a job interview, the interviewer asks why she was in jail (she's honest; the interviewer kicks her out). You get the gist. I'm sure a lot of the guesswork as to exactly why she killed her own child would have been negated had the main character simply said from the beginning, "My son had a terminal illness and was suffering terribly therefore I performed euthanasia, but the legal system hasn't worked out whether this is a just practice and therefore they tossed me in a jail cell." But I suppose there's no 'movie' in that (or maybe there is, but it needed to be smarter than this)....
