It’s a strange place for the older woman to be, her sibling barely a teenager when the one-time doctor inexplicably took the life of her six-year-old son. Since then the two have unsurprisingly become something akin to strangers, the pair’s parents forbidding their youngest daughter from even admitting her sister’s existence let alone authorizing a visit to see her behind bars.

What happens from there? That is the central mystery hovering over the blisteringly emotional and staggeringly enthralling new French drama I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), and it is one that gets answered with astonishing subtlety. This film is raw, profound and shockingly alive in naturalistic tenderness and intensity. It is, in short, a gift, and without question it is one of the finest pieces of character-driven melodrama – along with The Edge of Heaven, The Visitor and Rachel Getting Married – that I’ve seen this year.

Working from his own acclaimed novel, writer and director Phillippe Claudel has crafted a delicately magnificent debut that, like fellow Gallic imports Tell No One and The Grocer’s Son, rises above cultural barriers to become something timelessly magnificent. It speaks with such intimate grace upon the human condition words almost can’t express my profound joy, the film a glorious reminder of just how universally transcendent great pieces of cinema can truly be.

Watching Juliette’s slow transformation from caged, wounded animal unable to get over the tragedies clouding her mind into a nimble, deeply passionate woman full of compassion and caring is as sublime as it is breathtaking. She is a person who has experienced almost unimaginable pain, so distraught by her past she’s unwilling to even ponder – let alone accept – even the simplest notion of forgiveness. Yet being back in the world, dealing with depressive tales of woe from peers, childish flights of innocent fancy from her nieces and the sympathetic advances of a caring University professor, has a startling effect upon the woman, Juliette rediscovering long-buried layers left behind cold steel bars many years prior.

That journey is contrasted with that of Léa. Her empathy knows no bounds, the almost all-encompassing joy she feels at her reunion with her sister allowing her to wall away the prickly reasons for their decade-and-a-half long estrangement. But the blunt happiness of this newfound togetherness is tempered as time ticks by and Juliette begins to thaw her icy shell. While Léa’s love is constant, the truth over the incarceration hovers over everything like a dagger ready to drop, and even as everything looks to be going smoothly the woman’s rigid refusal to seek an answer for the whys behind a past misdeed can only last so long.

At first I wasn’t quite sure what the fuss about this one was all about. The movie is never slow, but is does start leisurely, Claudel stalking around his characters like a cat playfully hunting its prey. But as things proceed the director’s intentions tactfully reveal themselves. Each facet of the story’s structure starts intertwining and reconnecting in ways that shatter preconception and consistently surprise, the filmmaker refusing to rely upon cliché or genre stereotypes infusing his movie with a lived-in authenticity that’s as vividly alive as our very own.

There has been much talk of Thomas being a lock for an Academy Award nomination for her performance here. That talk is not pointless hyperbole. The only actresses I think have come close to matching her perfection have been Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky and Anne Hathaway in the aforementioned Rachel Getting Married, but even those comparisons miss the mark. If anything, the only other semi-recent person I can equate her with is La Vie en Rose Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard, but even then I’m not entirely sure I’m fully explaining just how good the woman is.

The simple fact is that Thomas does more with Juliette than you would remotely expect her to. What’s more, she does it with brutally direct simplicity, belying the usual overly emotional histrionics and quirky tricks actors tend to employ when taking on a character with this much melodramatic baggage. There is nothing false about her choices, no wrong moves or disconcerting missteps taking me out of the movie. I believed her from the very first moment she comes onscreen, each step of her journey as believable and as dynamic as anything I’ve maybe had the pleasure of dissecting in my time as professional critic.

As timeless as this performance is, however, it would mean absolutely nothing if Zylberstein didn’t come within a hair’s breathe of matching her. If anything, the journey Léa takes is maybe even more of a whirlwind roller coaster than that of her sister and the actress traverses this complicated interpersonal amusement park with astonishing vivacity. It is this relationship that ultimately allows the film to pack such a poignant wallop, and if Thomas does indeed earn herself a nomination it would be almost beyond tragic if Zylberstein doesn’t do the same.

There will be those who say nothing of real import happens here, that little has changed for the sisters by the time the film ends. I couldn’t disagree more. Few motion pictures have tackled the almost ethereal bonds of sisterhood as profoundly or as movingly as Claudel does, the whole picture building to such a wondrous coda of honesty, reconciliation, rebirth and forgiveness I walked out of the theater awestruck by the warmth of its rapturously tender embrace. This is a movie I can’t help but adore, I’ve Loved You So Long a powerful charmer bordering on the classic.

- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle 

Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)

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