Le septième ciel

Sandrine Kiberlain, with the wonderfully elongated physique of a gazelle, begins the film like Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool. She plays Mathilde, a haute-bourgeois woman compelled to shoplift without knowing why. François Berléand is the José Ferrer figure, a mysterious and slightly sinister doctor who steps in, saves Mathilde from arrest, and takes her into his personal care. As opposed to the dark, murderous figure in Preminger’s original, Berléand’s hypnotist/doctor turns out to be Mathilde’s liberator, clearing up her feng shui and allowing her to experience orgasm for the first time. It is the supreme insight of Jacquot and his frequent writing partner, the brilliant Jérôme Beaujour, that the minute Kiberlain’s Mathilde finds her own equilibrium, her husband (Vincent Lindon, also Kiberlain’s husband in real life) loses his. A film of seemingly impossible grace and enveloping warmth, and an oddly moving and often exhilarating fable of modern marriage. (KJ)