Patience is the primary attribute audiences will need to have on hand for “Hold Me Tight,” the new film from director Mathieu Amalric.
Probably best known to American audiences as an actor, Mr. Amalric has been seen in arthouse fare like “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and he proved a capable foe for James Bond in 2008’s “Quantum of Solace.” Mr. Amalric is also a dab hand in the director’s seat, having worked as assistant to Louis Malle and Alain Tanner before establishing himself with features like “The Blue Room” and “Barbara.”
He adapted his current film from an unproduced play by Claudine Galea titled “Je reviens de loin.” Those who shy away from cinematic turns on theatrical properties — which do, on the whole, tend toward the static — can rest assured that the director has done his homework. Before writing the screenplay, Mr. Almaric sat himself down to watch a host of movies, including those by Marcel Pagnol, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, Alan Resnais, and the good folks at Pixar. A wide net of influence informs “Hold Me Tight.”
Be warned, however: Viewers in the mood for directorial fluency and a linear storyline will want to think twice before buying a ticket. “Hold Me Tight” is impressionistic and fractured, a shifting compendium of moments that coalesce into both fiction and fantasy; the challenge is in differentiating one from the other. Although we settle fairly quickly into the picture’s rhythms, the narrative structure is less readily apparent. Transitions between the past, the present, and the fanciful are promiscuous, frequent, and sometimes confusing.
The film begins with a set of hands playing a memory game using an overturned set of Polaroid photos. They belong to Clarisse (Vicky Krieps, from “Bergman Island” and “Phantom Thread”), and her efforts to match the images become increasingly frustrated before the game is abandoned altogether. Clarisse’s home is situated in a picturesque French outpost surrounded by a not-so picturesque industrial complex. The smoke it spews across the bucolic township doesn’t bode well.
Clarisse lives with her husband (Arieh Worthalter), daughter Lucie (Juliette Benveniste/Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet), and son Paul (Auréle Grzesik/Sacha Ardilly). Marc is a doting husband and father, and Paul a precocious preteen. Lucie? Well, she’s a child of prodigious gifts, a pianist whose talents bely her age. The household is characterized by security, comfort, and routine. The kids need to get to school, Marc is off to work, and another day begins.
Except one morning Clarisse wakes up early, takes the family car, and leaves. She stops at an Esso station, fills up the tank, mentions something about visiting the seashore, and continues on her travels. In the meantime, Marc, Lucie, and Paul wake up and wonder about mom’s whereabouts. They study a grocery list she’s left behind as if it were a Runic tome worthy of divination. Wonder turns to worry. What is it that Clarisse is escaping from?
Saying too much more would put a damper on the disclosures to come. The film continues to scuttle across time and space, and increasingly takes on Clarisse’s psychological viewpoint. Mr. Almaric shows us how Clarisse and Marc first met, how the children adapt to Clarisse’s absence, and how Lucie’s preternatural skills earn an audition at a prestigious music academy. Then there’s the matter of the person who’s been stalking Lucie, as well as Clarisse’s recurring visits to what look to be the Pyrenees.
At which point, an already kaleidoscopic plot doubles down on its ambiguities — so much so that we begin to doubt Clarisse’s hold on reality and, for that matter, our hold on Clarisse’s reality. Around the three-quarter mark, the pieces of the puzzle begin to snap into place. Those who manage to sit out the film’s initial disarray will find a measure of resolution.
“Hold Me Tight” isn’t without its faults, but it is ambitious in construction and has a fairly solid grasp on dramatic intricacies. It’s evident that Mr. Almaric worked closely with editor François Gédigier — the film’s elisions in tempo and chronology are deftly engineered — as well as cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, who knows how to orchestrate tension through alterations in value and color.
The casting of Ms. Krieps was, I believe, ill-judged — she’s too aloof an actress to make for a convincing maternal figure. But, boy, do Mlle. Benveniste and Bowen-Chatet hold the screen as Lucie, providing, as they do, a welcome grounding to the movie’s more poetic wanderings. Lucie’s story may be a sidebar to the main thrust of the film, but it is within the promises it sets out, as well as the tragedy to which the character succumbs, that “Hold Me Tight” locates its true heart.
(c) 2022 Mario Nave
This review was originally published in the September 12, 2022 edition of The New York Sun.
Too Much Art 