Villa Amalia (PG) ***
Running time: 94 mins
You wait ages for a film in which Isabelle Huppert strives to maintain her independence from the chaos surrounding her, and then two arrive at once. Cheekily opening a week before the superior White Material, Benoit Jacquot’s funny-peculiar drama casts Huppert as a secretive concert pianist born Eliane Hidelstein, but now playing under the punning stage name Ann Hidden. After encountering a childhood sweetheart (Jean-Hugues Anglade), Ann-Eliane is inspired to quit her husband, tour and swanky pad to seek another life elsewhere: practically every scene in the first half finds the lead looking pensive, then tearful, and then scurrying out of shot.
A greatest hits package for Huppertphiles, Jacquot’s film would veer surprisingly close to conventional getaway fantasy, were it not for its discordant notes; anyone expecting genial, Letters to Juliet-like escapism should know there’s an hour of the pianist struggling to offload her worldly goods before the Italian sun comes out - and even then Ann cramps up while swimming. Tapping the common contemporary desire to start over from scratch, it allows Huppert to shed layers of identity with some skill, but you’d perhaps need Pascal Quignard’s source novel on hand to make complete sense of a heroine who remains much like the titular property: remote and boarded up.
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