Isabelle Huppert in ‘About Joan’ (‘À propos de Joan’): Film Review | Berlin 2022

OK, sure, call it an ivory tower problem, but there are few things sadder than a great screen actor getting a career honor at a major festival tethered to the premiere of an embarrassingly bad film. Even more depressing is the thought that the good folks at the Berlinale might have programmed About Joan for any reason other than to sprinkle some magical Isabelle Huppert hauteur on this year’s glamor-light red carpet. Her last-minute cancellation due to a positive COVID test nixed that benefit, too.

The revered French star could be magnificently magnetic reading her grocery lists, but even she struggles to overcome the fussily fragmented approach, the overload of contrived quirks and the yawning absence of story sense in Laurent Larivière’s wafty melodrama.

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Huppert plays the Joan of the title, a well-heeled, recently retired French publisher who opens the film with a direct-to-camera address from behind the wheel of her car at night. She comments on how frequently her name is mixed up with Jeanne or Joanne or even John, before promising to take us on a journey through her life that may be part fiction. Bonsoir, unreliable narrator!

Joan is headed to her country home on a pretty estate and thoughts of the past have been stirred up by a chance encounter in Paris with Doug (Stanley Townsend). Turns out he was her first love back when she was living and working in Ireland as an au pair in the 1970s. The young Joan (Freya Mavor) spots him picking pockets and lifting watches and jewelry at a train station, but she’s more amused than shocked. Brazenly unashamed Doug (Éanna Hardwicke) invites her for a pint of Guinness, and before long, they’re an item. Joan lends a hand in Doug’s thieving until a brush with the law separates them.

Back in France, Joan raises her son from that Irish fling, Nathan (played at different ages by Louis Broust and Dimitri Doré), with help from her parents. But her folks separate when her mother Madeleine (Florence Loiret Caille) runs off to Japan with her martial arts instructor, declaring that she must explore her passion rather than live a suffocated life. Audiences who were irked by the buffoonish Asian joke in Licorice Pizza should get a load of Madeleine’s kimono routine. Her sensual self-discovery is revealed in a bizarrely incongruous fantasy sequence where she makes love with a giant octopus. That erotica image is redolent of Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, a print of which hangs in Joan’s house.

Since this is the kind of Euro film where love interests tend to be dictated by co-production agreements, Joan lands in a relationship with Tim (Lars Eidinger), a hard-drinking, moody German author published by her company. And the adult Nathan (Swann Arlaud) returns from Montreal to visit, his younger incarnations having dropped a trail of clues about his life like breadcrumbs in a forest.

The major reveal in the screenplay by François Decodts and Larivière — and Joan’s means of coping with devastating sorrow — is signaled well before it’s all spelled out. So it’s less the solution to a dreamlike puzzle than a device we’ve seen too many times in memory dramas.

The film doesn’t linger long enough in any of its narrative detours to engender much affection for its characters. That goes for Joan, too, even if the spirited Mavor is credibly paired with the always commanding Huppert. Both deserve better material.

Larivière (I Am a Soldier) lurches from one point to another, shifting among often garish color palettes and visual textures to demarcate the different pockets of Joan’s memory. Editor Marie-Pierre Frappier works hard to find some flow in all this, but About Joan remains a frustratingly distancing movie, only intermittently involving and too self-conscious to get out of its own way and tell the protagonist’s story.