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Heart-to-heart discussions between daughter (Céline Lomez) and mother-in-law (Charlotte
Boisjoli) in Ga peut pas 6tre I’hiver.
her new-found freedom. The film ends with Germain, and her family, seeing her off on along-desired trip to Japan. As the car she is in pulls out of her driveway, the camera zooms in on the “For Sale” sign which now graces her lawn. The home which she had so tenaciously held on to, and into which she had even taken a “surrogate husband” to try and maintain a reasonable facsimile of the previous order, is now paying for a jaunt to the Orient.
This note of consolidated independence brings to mind a little too readily the ending of An Unmarried Woman, in which Clayburgh says “no” to a gorgeous
In the
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hunk of an artist (Alan Bates) in order to pursue her independent life — the new “happy ending” now that marriage is out. But even were this not the case, Ca ne peut... would still have difficulty qualifying as much more than a satisfactory made-for-TV drama.
This is due largely to the film’s somewhat perfunctory script which, although it occasionally hints at aspects of Adéle’s inner life, seems mostly intent on merely documenting the requisite exterior phases of her evolution. We see Adéle going through all the prescribed motions, even having all the prescribed problems, but little else.
FILM REVIEWS
The realization that her marriage was really far from satisfactory, her desire for independence from her children, her daughter's discomfort at Adéle’s new life could, if developed, have lent the film some much-needed depth (not really provided by the black-and-white flashbacks to her married life). Instead, the realization about her marriage comes about so mechanically that it almost seems a device designed to bring her out of her depression: one day Adeéle stops in at a local café and encounters another widow who tells her how much she misses her own husband because he had been, above all, a friend to her. The conversation enlightens Adéle and almost instantaneously brings to a close her period of mourning. On to the next phase...
The film’s only real moments of depth are provided by Adéle’s reactions to her daughter's feeling of rejection. She realizes, among other things, that as a young woman she had always rejoiced much more at the birth of a son than of a daughter. Over dinner, Adéle confesses to Germain that the prospect of having a son had always been more exciting because — although she could not have formulated it at the time — men live real lives, while women are forced to live “in their heads”.
I suspect that the lack of more moments which might have lent some de
gree of individuality and depth to Adéle’s
drama may be due to Louise Carré’s desire to make her heroine a sort of “everywoman”, a_ perfectly ordinary woman who lives a painful but otherwise ordinary experience. However, as a result, her story takes on the characteristics of a case history. Adéle’s experience, rather than universal, all too often appears prototypical.
Lucienne Kroha
West, it's always...
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