'About Joan' Review: Isabelle Huppert Wanders Down Memory Lane [Berlin]

It sounds like the set-up to a French New Wave film: a French au pair falls in love with an Irish pickpocket leading to a whirlwind romance that changes both their lives. It might be twee, but Joan Verra (Isabelle Huppert) lived it, and on a long, rainy, nighttime drive she reflects on the intense, yet fleeting relationship of her youth. Breaking the fourth wall, Joan speaks to us directly, musing on truth, memory, and the hazy ground that exists between them. “About Joan” is, well, about Joan, who has experienced the successes, heartbreaks, regrets, and happiness you’d expect from anyone who has reached their golden years. The problem is that co-writer and director Laurent Larivière gives us very little reason to care about Joan’s life, which seems to have been governed more by chance, than any particular whims or will of her own.

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After her long drive, Joan winds up at her sprawling French estate, where she rattles around lost in thought, engaging with her past both literally and figuratively. The fourth-wall-breaking narration quickly disappears and is replaced by a somewhat muddled flashback structure which allows us to continue following Joan in her ruminations. Her dalliance with a finger-smith named Doug (Éanna Hardwicke) resulted in a child that Joan wound up raising alone after he gets sent away to prison on petty theft charges. When Joan bumps into Doug years later (now played by Stanley Townsend) on the streets of Paris where she now lives, he’s older, heavier, greyer, and sadder — a far cry from the fearless, dashing daredevil she once knew. Doug didn’t know about their son, Nathan (Swann Arlaud), back then, and Joan doesn’t tell him now. It would complicate the current troubles in Doug’s life, and perhaps selfishly, she wants to hang on to Nathan, who she adores, for herself. But that love is parceled out in small doses, if at all.

Indeed, there is a streak of coldness that runs through Joan, an attitude she adopts which keeps both her child and lovers at a slight remove, as if afraid to make herself wholly vulnerable again. After Doug, her most significant relationship was with Tim Ardenne (Lars Eidinger), a self-loathing and self-destructive writer she meets while working as his top-shelf editor. But outside of Tim, Joan doesn’t seem to have any friends or anything resembling a social or professional circle. Our only understanding of Joan is from Joan herself, and yet, it’s hard to grasp what makes her tick. “About Joan” is elusive about its titular character, but not in a way that seems to have been intended. For a film that opens as a confessional, it remains a mystery how an au-pair-turned-single-mother becomes a power player in publishing. If Joan has a life outside the orbit of herself and her son, we don’t see it. If Joan has longed for anything else in her life, we don’t know what it is. If Larivière is straining toward an illustration of life’s intangibles, framing it around a character study is a miscalculation. 

Throughout the picture, “About Joan” struggles with what kind of movie it wants to be. The film’s first-person storytelling device is dropped after the first act. Aside from a somewhat baffling and fantastical sex sequence involving a squid, it’s an intimate drama. The reaches toward comedy veer from softly amusing to uncertain. Tim’s pretentious quasi-philosophical brand of windbaggery earns a good laugh when we learn his book, pompously titled The Misery of Beautiful Days, is about a garbageman crushed to death by his truck. But a subplot that finds Joan’s mother falling in love with her martial arts teacher, appropriating Japanese culture, getting a divorce, and suddenly moving to Tokyo with her lover tries to thread the line between zany and heart-rending, but can’t strike the balance. Joan cuts off all contact anyway, and again, we’re left largely in the dark about how she grapples with this second straight abandonment following Doug. Everything builds to a chintzy third-act twist that, while meant to illuminate Joan’s buried pain and thus her detachment, feels like an unearned short-hand. At the very least, we do get to spend a good portion of the running time in the company of Isabelle Huppert, who is always committed to every role, at a bare minimum. The actress fills the loose spaces script, but can’t save it alone when everything else about the production feels perfunctory. 

The memories we carry are carved by time, shaped by the power of myth we imbue them with, and given stature by the responsibility of truth that we demand they carry. These ideas are all introduced as Joan navigates a rainy night, alone, at the beginning of the film. But in the telling of the story, “About Joan” loses the thread of the themes behind it, and we’re left to wander the hallways of Joan’s life with little to guide us. [C]

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