Katell Quilléveré’s Love Like Poison (Un Poison violent) is about a 14-year-old girl named Anna, who is spending her summer holidays at home in the countryside with her mother and bedridden paternal grandfather. Her father has recently left her mother for another woman, and her mother is meanwhile developing feelings for the local priest, Père François (played by Stefano Cassetti, the first person I have ever seen who looks more attractive with large glasses and a full beard).
The narrative flows along gently, imitating the way time must creep by in real life for an adolescent girl in a tiny village. Some might say the story moves far too slowly, and although I enjoyed the film’s tranquillity, I have to admit that I was hoping for a little more action. The biggest events in Anna’s life are church ceremonies, contact with her father, and the gradual advances of her friend Pierre, who is falling in love with her. The mother’s relationship with the priest, meanwhile, reaches its climax with a kiss on the neck (admittedly a big deal when one is celibate, but after The Crime of Father Amaro…).
The only real surprises in this film are the sexual undercurrent in Anna’s relationship with her grandfather, and her mother’s feelings of jealousy towards her. As so many films present romanticized parent-child relationships, where fathers and mothers are blindly devoted to their children and will do anything for them, it can be difficult to accept films that point to more complicated parental feelings. In Mahmat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man/Un Homme qui crie, I had trouble believing that a good father would betray his son, especially over something relatively insignificant. When films do feature parents who are vindictive towards their children, they are typically portrayed as monsters rather than fallible human beings. In Love Like Poison, when Anna’s mother barged into the bathroom while her daughter was changing her clothes, I was reminded of Isabelle Huppert as the madly controlling mother in Christophe Honoré’s Ma mère. Yet Anna’s mother is not mad, merely frustrated: as Père François observes during her confession, her jealousy of her daughter’s youth and beauty is only human.
In a film where the Catholic church is featured together with young people, the audience is primed to expect sexual threat from the priest or the bishop, but there is none. The film instead explores the impurity of children on the brink of adulthood: Pierre laughs about his grandmother calling him an ‘angel’ when he is dressed in his choirboy outfit, while Anna hesitates over her confirmation because of the ‘strange thoughts’ she has been having. The biggest sexual threat in this film seems to come not from the priest but from Anna’s atheist grandfather, who at the same time is stereotypically mischievous and fun-loving: he and Anna clearly understand each other, even if his physicality at times disgusts her. The film’s reflection of a burgeoning awareness of sexuality in its protagonist reminds me of two surrealist-influenced films. In the film’s opening sequence, when Anna does not open her mouth to receive the wafer from the priest, the film reminds me of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour, where the protagonist, as she overcomes her aversion to sex, experiences flashbacks of her childhood when she was abused. One of these flashbacks is of herself as a young girl in confirmation clothes who refuses to open her mouth when the priest offers her the host. There are stronger similarities between Love Like Poison and Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders/Valerie a týden divů: this film is also set in a small country village, stars a girl with long red hair who is on the brink of womanhood, and who is suddenly aware of the sexual dimension of everyone around her. If you place some images from the two films alongside each other, the visual parallels are striking.
While Buñuel’s and Jireš’s films are marked by anticlericalism, however, Quillévéré’s displays a refreshing degree of sympathy for every character, and understanding of their beliefs. When the grandfather drives away the visiting priest with a rude song, viewers may sympathise with his distaste for the unwelcome house call, but will also feel sorry for the gentle and well-meaning priest. The priest is in fact the most well-wrought character in the film: the audience learns a lot about his history and motivations, and he is entirely believable. This is all the more impressive given that Cassetti normally plays cruel and violent characters.
Love Like Poison is also unlike Belle de jour or Valerie in that there is no indication that any of the scenes are merely a product of Anna’s imagination: even the most surprising sequences remain plausible and appear as realistic as the rest. Set in the Loire region of France, visually the film evokes Vermeer or Dürer, with its clear northern European light quality, rural and domestic settings and the largely natural, realistic appearance of its characters. It adopts the religious themes of the German painter, and the Dutch painter’s use of striking colour accents such as blue and yellow.
Finally, Love Like Poison differs from Buñuel’s and Jireš’s films, and from many other films about young women discovering their sexuality, in that it is directed by someone who has direct experience of this. It portrays Anna’s disgust and ambivalence in relation to sex, as well as realistic expressions of curiosity and desire. There have been a number of films by women directors which give a specifically female perspective on the experience of growing up: Céline Sciamma’s Waterlillies/La Naissance de pieuvres is a recent example, yet it represented quite different experiences in different way than Love Like Poison. I hope that we will continue to see more films by female directors treating the topic of women’s experience, as it is important for women to be able to see more realistic reflections of their concerns on screen. At my first few press screenings of this year’s London Film Festival, looking around me I was astonished by the degree to which men outnumber women. At a public cinema screening, there are usually at least as many women as men in the audience. But based on attendance at press screenings, it seems that far more men than women choose to write about film. Does this reflect discrimination against women when it comes to hiring, or is it that fewer women are moved to write about film? Although I would never say that directors are only qualified to portray their own first-hand experiences, there is a significant dimension missing if it is primarily men who determine the way in which women are portrayed on film. As one of the functions of art is to help us to interpret our own lives, it is important to have films that provide an authentic reflection of what women’s experience of life is really like. Love Like Poison is a film which helps to fill this gap in contemporary artistic production.
A Love Like Poison is screening at the London Film Festival on Friday the 15th and Sunday the 17th of October at the Curzon Mayfair. It will be released in the UK by Artificial Eye.
