The Widow of Saint-Pierre

Shari L. Rosenblum

Dank and murky, the island of Saint-Pierre and its environs (real or recreated) make an apt setting for the gray morality tale cast over Patrice Leconte's The Widow of Saint-Pierre - a film about a murder, a guillotine, redemption and punishment. An exercise in right and wrong, the film tries to paint its questions black and white, but the ethical edges fade into each other, and the silent truths the filmmakers want to avoid cast a pall over the would-be bright-line principles.

The story begins on a thick-fogged night in 1849 in the seas around the small French islands off the coast of Newfoundland. Two fishermen in an argument about another man's size drink themselves into an equally thick-fogged insanity, which escalates to the brutal murder of the third man. A quick court case and a death sentence for one of the men follow shortly thereafter, and justice seems swift. But there is a hitch. The islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon have no guillotine. And no executioner. The sentence must be postponed indefinitely.

As the islanders wait for the fated blade to arrive from afar, the sentenced man, Auguste Neel (Emir Kusturica) is entrusted to the local jail - overseen officially by Le Capitaine (Daniel Auteuil) and emotionally by the Captain's wife, Madame La (Juliette Binoche). Madame La's attention to the prisoner contours a would-be eloquent polemic against capital punishment. The prototype of the liberated woman, self -assured and iron-willed, she takes the prisoner defiantly under her wing, out of the prison, and into the community - rehabilitation be proven and propriety and her husband's reputation be damned. The Captain's attention to Madame La in the face of all this - he supports her adoringly in all of her choices, be they injudicious, unseemly, illegal, or ruinous - shades in the subtler curves and angles of the political debate, and highlights its costs.

Based on a historical event that took place forty years after the moment chosen here for its reenactment, the screenplay by Claude Faraldo strikes first as selectively forgetful: the murdered man and his family are quickly excised from consciousness - and second, as politically out of sync with both of its times. But the film acknowledges its inaccuracies with invented historical relevance (placing it in tandem with the Commune to give it a political momentousness) and a flourish of camouflage - fantastical romantic ideals to justify the unjustified. The Captain's support for his anachronistically feminist wife is presented as emblematic of true and abiding love without limits; his wife's social conscience blurred with a rhapsodically unthinkable, unrealizable, desire-cum-compassion for the convicted man.

The obvious oversights troubled me, the invented historical connection seemed inadequate, and the fantasies, sadly, did not work at all. Not for me, not for the film. Despite some beautifully crafted cinematographic moments of tenderness. Both thematically and subtextually, righteousness and romance are short of the sufficient time to rise up and rouse us before they are struck down fatally at the head.

If such head-battering imagery seems heavy-handed here, know that it is similarly inflicted in the film - with even more emboldened blows. The screenplay is hammered through with echoes, allusions and suggestions of the scaffold's punishment. And for all its purported liberal sentiments of forgiveness, it sets blame clearly upon some very particular and pretty shoulders - those of Madame La.

The standard review of this film, based (I presume) on notes from the press kit, will tell you that the widow in the film's title is a clever double entendre: it stands not only for the as yet unidentified bereaved wife or wives that the film will leave, but also for the machine of bereavement par excellence - "la veuve" (the widow) being common slang of the time for the guillotine. The reasoning behind the double play is left unremarked upon in these reviews - presumably because the press kit does not explain it.

Nonetheless, it is very clear from the film's opening scene - Juliette Binoche in mourner's black and powder white skin staring out into the vast expanse over the sea-that Madame La and the guillotine are to be paralleled by more than just a clever titular pun. And with some significance.

The captain's wife was meant to be called Madame la Capitaine, the narration tells us. But the islanders, hesitant to allow the woman the honorific - to give her her head, so to speak ("capitaine" / "captain" is derived from the Latin "caput": "head"), preferred to chop it off. Leaving her as Madame La. The narration tells us, further, that she had, in marrying, been deprived of another name - her family's, with its accompanying social status. It is not surprising, then, given her twice cut-down heading, that she should identify with a man about to lose his own.

But there is a note of irony in that identification - because the message from title forward is that she is to be identified with the machine, not its victim. And, of course, in the talk of the time, "la veuve" was also known familiarly as "Madame la Guillotine" - suggesting a different fill-in for the ending of Madame La. It is my suspicion that the irony is deliberate.

As with Madame La's actions, the idea behind the guillotine was humane. It was a device designed and propagated to improve on the brutal and inhuman forms of execution it replaced - a single coup, quick and sharp, kindness in cruelty. If, alas, the blade's humaneness was more theoretical than practical - and the necks placed on the scaffold left to suffer variously horrific ends - so too does Madame La's kindness fail the ultimate test. It is precisely by and because of her humane intent - the quickness of her instinct, the sharpness of her ideals - that tragedy is unavoidable.

One walks away from The Widow of Saint-Pierre in a somber and contemplative mood. The acting is good, with Kusturica, in his acting debut, particularly real. And the dialogue, the costumes, and the scenery set a mood well established for deep thought and mournful regret. Still, I confess I would have preferred something closer to the real story - something with less romantic fluffery and more honest sentiment - and with something of the fascinating morbidity that infuses humanity at moments of great sympathy.

CineScene, 2001