A talkie, courtesy TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto.
The ones you love are never far from your thoughts, even when they’re far away.
I think that sentiment’s universal. I think that, if you said it to someone centuries ago, they’d nod their head, a little sadly, just the same. But they might see irony in it that we don’t. We’re a society that travels fast and communicates even faster, and for whom boundaries like marriage are fluid and frankly, not that strong. In other societies, in other times, ‘goodbye’ might have been the last words a loved one heard from you for years. Or there might be no goodbye at all: just the long torture of close proximity between you and your beloved… betrothed to another by unbreakable bonds.
Proximity is one of many themes in Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier: a bulky, moody, but mostly very good historical drama; a film at its best when revealing the consequences of expressing human feelings in circumstances indifferent to them. The setting is 16th Century France; the circumstances: the renewed Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. The players: the French aristocracy and their attendants. In this unstable period, love was a luxury that had little, if anything to do with one’s decision to get married.
