Four years ago, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer went from the high of a Cannes Film Festival full of rave reviews of her period drama Corsage to the depths of desperation at learning that one of the film’s stars – Florian Teichtmeister – had been accused and subsequently charged with possession and production of child pornography. Teichtmeister’s crimes and sentencing bitterly tarnished much of the remainder of Corsage’s release, so curiosity ramped up rapidly when Kreutzer’s next project was confirmed to be about child sexual exploitation.
The director claimed that Gentle Monster had been brewing for years before the incident, but it is impossible to not see it as intricately tied to her real-life experience. This personal connection clouds much of a drama guided by a disorienting sense of lingering confusion and uncertainty, and that follows the tortuous predicament of Léa Seydoux’s Lucy Weiss, a musician whose marriage to filmmaker Philip (Laurence Rupp) is irrevocably shattered when he is taken into police custody under suspicion of possessing and distributing sexualised images of children.
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Before the visit from the police that would violently split their life into two disctint periods, Lucy and Philip were settling into their new lavish countryside manor, a home big enough to fit multiples of their family of three. We first find the couple leisurely spending afternoons attempting to assemble a garden trampoline or singing ‘Yellow’ their nine-year-old son Johnny (Malo Blanchet), the rhythms of their life dictated by the ebbs and flows of productivity that often plague creatives. Lucy cooks while Philip goes on early morning runs – when he returns home soaked in sweat he heads straight to the shower, only to emerge naked and dripping wet, running after Johnny and placing him firmly on his lap to ensure the boy brushes his teeth properly.
This is one of many unsettling but ultimately vapid provocative scenes, with Kreutzer’s insistence on empty suggestion – coupled with a nagging seesawing of repeated setups with no proper payoff – turning Gentle Monster into a frustrating dissection of a taboo that demands careful consideration. Pianist Lucy’s work revolves around “deconstructing” pop music made by men, her long fingers poking and prodding at the piano keys as Kreutzer makes her a conduit of overexposition. As the French actress poorly whispers the lyrics to Charles & Eddie’s hit song ‘Would I Lie To You?’ one can almost hear the thud of the hammer hitting any semblance of subtlety away.
A subplot involving a stern policewoman tasked with caring for her ailing father further clogs the film’s rhythm, with Kreutzer far too concerned with framing her story through a wide lens instead of zooming in on the already tangled breakdown of a relationship ruined by the terrifying realisation that one can never fully know another person. The usually excellent Seydoux clumsily walks into the traps of the film’s tendency for the pastiche, contorting her beautiful face into a Munchian expression as she performatively enunciates a climactic monologue delivered with such constrained attachment to the page that it utterly shatters any pretence of something real.
It is a shame this meta-drama-slash-thriller shows an almost unbelievable resistance to tug and pull at the tough knots of the shattering ripples of paraphilia. What remains in its place is a carcass of possible brilliance, too afraid to cross a line that had already been shredded from the start.