Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller, 2012)

The last film made by Miller before his death, Thérèse Desqueyroux is a period drama set in the Landes region of France in the late 'twenties, in the milieu of land-owning families concerned above all else with maintaining their power and status. They are a tedious lot altogether, with their interminable talk of hunting and weather, and Audrey Tautou's Thérèse has the misfortune of being a free thinker in their midst. Her life of silent endurance is irrevocably changed when she then decides to start poisoning her boorish husband.
What lends a rather slight story some interest is the ambivalence of the characters and situations: far from being a driven and decisive revoluionary, Thérèse does not actually know what she wants so much as what she doesn't want, and is even inconsistent in this, while the husband for all his stifling banality is no simple male oppressor. Neither does it appear that we are to take the characters' second-hand philosophical musings at face value. Overall, the film generates a sense of disquiet without providing pat exit avenues.

6/10