Review: Éternité (Eternity)

The Vietnamese-born French writer-director Tran Anh Hung burst onto the international scene in 1993 with The Scent of the Green Papaya, which garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, a Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and a Cesar Award for Best Debut. His sixth film, Éternité (Eternity), adapted from the novel L'Élégance des veuves by Alice Ferney, bears the elegance, lyricism and languor that have become his hallmarks.

Tran has never been one to follow storytelling conventions, his work more often than not resembling tone poems or tableaux vivants. Indeed, Éternité, which boasts Audrey Tautou, Bérénice Bejo, Mélanie Laurent, and Irène Jacob, might be an almost embarrassingly sumptuous example of the style that is both Tran's blessing and curse. There's not much of a narrative per se. Instead, Tran observes the cycle of life as experienced by several generations of a particularly fertile French aristocratic family, beginning with Tautou's Valentine, who grows up in a breathtakingly beautiful belle-époque mansion. As a teenager, she marries Jules (Arieh Worthalter), whom she will love until his death three decades later. Their union produces about eight children, mostly boys, though Valentine will have the daughters for whom she hopes and on whom she lavishes particular attention.

One of her sons, Henri (Jérémie Renier), marries Mathilde (Laurent), who continues the family's prodigious bloodline. Mathilde's close friend, Gabrielle (Bejo) is equally bountiful and the three women, their husbands and children live and love and grieve and promenade through picturesque gardens and houses and apartments with birdsong, classical music and the omnipresent voiceover by Tran's wife, Tran Nu Yên-Khê, as accompaniment. It's all undeniably beautiful to look at, but the meandering and impressionistic approach becomes soporific. There's not much depth to the characters and so little variation in its hushed tones that the rare outburst becomes inherently overripe.

To be fair, despite the deliberate pacing, repetitive births and deaths, and superficial characterisations, his overriding message is clear and, in many instances, quite poignant. Birth is a wonder, and death has no logic. Whatever happens, we're born, we live, we love, we die, and the cycle is repeated by the next generation and the one after that and the one after that. We each may have but a brief moment in the sun, but that moment, in and of itself, may be enough to justify our existence.

Éternité (Eternity)

Directed by: Tran Anh Hung

Written by: Tran Anh Hung; adapted from the novel L'Élégance des veuves by Alice Ferney

Starring: Audrey Tautou, Bérénice Bejo, Mélanie Laurent, Jérémie Renier, Pierre Deladonchamps, Irène Jacob, Valérie Stroh, Arieh Worthalter, Tran Nu Yên-Khê