The Widow of St. Pierre

In "The Widow of St. Pierre," it's 1850 on the titular island, a tiny, strategically irrelevant French territory off the coast of Newfoundland. Nothing much normally happens on Saint Pierre besides gruesome, widow-making deaths at sea and bitterly cold winters, but one evening Ariel Neel Auguste (Emir Kusturica) and an accomplice get blind drunk and cut up an old man to see whether he's "fat" or just "big." The accomplice gets hard labor, but dies in a hail of stones thrown at the cart taking them both to jail. Neel gets death, but Saint Pierre has no guillotine or executioner, so he must live in a military outpost commanded by the Captain (Daniel Auteuil) until these can be secured. Saint Pierre is remote enough that it will take a while.

Meanwhile, the Captain's wife (Juliette Binoche) takes an interest in Neel, and takes advantage of his captivity to set him to a number of small tasks for the various widows of the island. She befriends him, helps him give up alcohol, and lets him reintroduce himself to the town as a good man. Neel becomes increasingly popular, and the town all but pronounces him indispensable when the guillotine arrives and an executioner is found. Madame La Capitaine (as she is called) isn't going to stand for this, and takes on the authority her husband represents to try to set Neel free. The Captain is forced to choose between his fierce love for his wife and his duty as an officer.

As directed by Patrice Leconte and scripted by Claude Faraldo (and based, however loosely, on historical events), "The Widow of St. Pierre" is quite an eloquent film. In a nearly wordless role, Kusturica effectively uses his physical bulk to suggest his transformation from savage to model citizen, changing his posture and physical gestures so gradually it's almost unnoticeable. Binoche is as radiant as she usually is, bringing her generous temperament and undeniable beauty to her role. And Auteuil is amazing in his role; he commands respect not only with his gravity and forthrightness, but also with his irresistible storms of rage and defiance. Leconte shows the landscape to the film's best advantage, and both director and screenwriter linger on significant visual and verbal details in the way that makes so many French films such feasts.

Still, "The Widow of St. Pierre" fails to convince in the end. Why? Well, it doesn't really address the question it poses. The dilemma here should be one of forgiveness, of rehabilitation. Neel has killed a man, cold-blooded, for no rational reason, and has been sentenced to death by a legally convened tribunal. If the guillotine had already been on the island, he'd be dead by the fifteenth minute of the film. Madame La Capitaine brings out the best in him, and it's nice that she does, but Neel has killed a man.

No one in the film realizes this. After an initial moment of fear, Madame La Capitaine decides on a whim that Neel is actually a good man and that any punishment he suffers is cruel. Despite Binoche's natural gravity, her character comes off as a flutterhead, ruled solely by her emotions, tenuously if at all aware of the realities and rationales for jurisprudence. When the moment of execution seems close at hand, even those who are in favor of Neel's execution are in favor of it because his continuing life "embarrasses" them for some unexplained reason.

At this film's close, the tension is not between capital punishment and some other form, or between forgiveness and punishment, but between the Captain's duty, as exemplified in the uniform he's always wearing, and his heart, as it has been captured by his wife. Since Leconte and Faraldo have stacked the deck for his wife with numerous scenes of the Captain angrily prosecuting real or imagined slights regarding the fact that his wife is spending a lot of time in this criminal's company, there's not really much tension in his final decision at all; we simply spend the last few minutes of the film watching it come to an inevitable conclusion.

If this film had actually debated the issues of crime and punishment before coming to this conclusion, it might have been palatable. But can you imagine, in our society, letting a murderer completely off the hook because the police chief's wife and the town have taken a shine to him? Even actors as talented and attractive as these can't pull it off. Despite its numerous filmmaking virtues, "The Widow of St. Pierre" plays too fast and loose with basic notions of morality to be completely emotionally convincing.

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