Love Like Poison (Un poison violent) (2010)
Reviewer: Pierre Badiola
Rated: 15 (UK)
Release Date: 13 May 2011
Director: Katell Quillévéré
Cast: Clara Augarde, Lio, Michel Galabru, Stefano Cassetti
Love Like Poison marks a debut for writer/director Katell Quillévéré, yet nests comfortably within the pantheon of similarly pitched, French coming-of-age dramas explored by the likes of Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) and Céline Sciamma (Waterlillies). Through it’s muted palette and sensitively tender eye, we witness the sexual maturation of it’s innocent jeune fille Anna (Clara Augarde), as well as the emotional maturation of the adults surrounding her over the course of one Summer.
Her mother Jeanne -- played by one of my favourite ‘80s French Pop icons, Lio -- has recently seperated from Anna’s father, and as such inhabits a melancholic state of stasis. They have taken to living in his pastoral country home while he is away, in the mean time looking after his ill father Jean (Michel Galabru), who relies on Anna to bathe him and keep him company. Amidst boarding school, Anna’s Confirmation looms and her spiritual faith seems encumbered by her recent parental trauma as well as her blossoming relationship with a moped-riding schoolboy named Pierre.
Both of those commitments sees her religious rites of passage collide with her biological ones, and Quillévéré finds the right kind of tone in exploring the murky emotional web that forms when sexuality taints logical thought and religious faith. Sometimes it manifests itself in insecurity, other times love, other times perversion.
And perversion is certainly one of the factors that helps this stand out from the crowd. Episodes involving the horny, bedridden Jean that sometimes cross into incest and paedophilia highlight both the disturbing and disturbingly comedic aspects of hormonal deviance.
However, Quillévéré presents the idea of sexuality as mainly an inescapable facet of life, and an immutably mysterious one. A developing relationship between Anna’s mother and a strapping young Italian priest (Stefano Cassetti) is all the more complex given his role as spiritual mentor to Anna. If someone so sure of his faith had given way to temptation, what hope is there for her? To the film’s detriment, the fate of Jeanne and the priest’s pairing is never resolved, though Anna’s journey that ends with self-offerings to both to sex and religion is a good indicator of the complex nature of sexuality and the rudimentary boundaries governing it.
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