seventh heaven (le septième ciel) 1997 region free dvd5 french bcbc

Seventh Heaven (French: Le Septième Ciel) is a 1997 French drama film directed by Benoît Jacquot and starring Sandrine Kiberlain, Vincent Lindon and François Berléand.

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Synopsis

Sandrine Kiberlain, Vincent Lindon and Francois Berleand star in this psychological drama directed by Benoit Jacquot about a married woman with a need to shoplift the most innocuous objects from the stores she frequents. With the help of a bizarre doctor, she cures her illness, but soon the doctor usurps her husband and becomes the most important person in her life, threatening her marriage.



Cast

Sandrine Kiberlain, Vincent Lindon, François Berléand, Francine Berge, Pierre Cassignard, Philippe Magnan, Florence Loiret Caille, Leo Le Bevillon, Sylvie Loeillet



Movie Review

Seventh Heaven (1997)

July 31, 1998

FILM REVIEW; Plumbing the Subconscious to Reach Marital Equilibrium

By Stephen Holden

Hypnotism and feng shui (the Eastern philosophy involving the strategic placement of buildings and their contents to achieve a greater harmony with nature) are forces that impinge powerfully on the marriage of Mathilde (Sandrine Kiberlain), a neurotic 29-year-old Parisian, and her 39-year-old husband, Nico (Vincent Lindon), a successful orthopedic surgeon. In Benoit Jacquot's eerie, exquisitely subtle film ''Seventh Heaven,'' which opens today at the Quad Cinema, both are crucial elements of what might be described as a psychological mystery that exudes a faint undertone of menace.



Directed by the French filmmaker who created a splash last year with ''A Single Girl,'' ''Seventh Heaven'' is an open-ended meditation on the delicate power dynamics of a marriage, presented as an elaborate psychic whodunit. In its early scenes, Mathilde, a dour, beautiful woman with a faraway look in her eyes, is suffering from fainting spells, which often follow episodes of kleptomania.



One evening at a cocktail party she catches the eye of a grim-faced middle-aged guest (Francois Berleand), who shoots her a look that implies he can read her mind. A few days later, when Mathilde suffers another fainting spell after pocketing an item in a toy store, she regains consciousness to find the unsmiling mystery guest beside her. Escorting her to lunch in a deserted restaurant, he directs intimate questions at the dazed woman in a voice that suggests he may already know the answers.



The two begin hypnotherapy sessions in which he explores her childhood relationship with a father who may have sexually abused her while telling her an entrancing bedtime story. We also learn that around that time, her father died in a possible suicide. When asked about the past, Mathilde's seductive, meddlesome mother, who is still beautiful at 53, equivocates and recalls her husband as being insanely jealous.



While in a hypnotic trance, Mathilde, who has been sexually unresponsive to her husband, becomes spontaneously orgasmic. At the end of their first session, the doctor advises her to rearrange her home so that the bedroom and the study are reversed. The new arrangement has a startling effect on her marriage. The balance of sexual power changes so dramatically that Nico is thrown into a tailspin, and after he has an odd, sexually ambiguous encounter with a younger male colleague in a bar, Nico seeks professional help.



What's so remarkable about the film is that its mixture of personal erotic history, speculation and bedroom confusion is presented without a tinge of hysteria. While examining the phenomenon of repressed memory, the movie makes no judgments about its reliability. Its vision of the typical bourgeois family (Mathilde and Nico have a young son) is of an erotically charged organism in which energy, information and vibrations are continually circulating. If there have been any sexual crimes, it suggests, everyone is deeply implicated.



In the scenes in which Mathilde drifts almost like a sleepwalker through the city, Ms. Kiberlain recalls both Monica Vitti wandering dazedly through Antonioni's ''Red Desert'' and Tippi Hedren in ''Marnie.'' But in Mr. Jacquot's film, the melodrama has been stripped away. Instead of a hellish vision of spiritual ennui or a lurid Freudian nightmare, ''Seventh Heaven'' presents its characters' turmoil as completely ordinary. At the same time, it leaves its mysteries, including the identity and motives of the hypnotist, unsolved.



It is this everyday quality of the film that sets it apart. Middle-class marital ''seventh heaven,'' it suggests, is a state of functioning imperfection, in which powerful psychological forces reach an equilibrium that is tenuous and unsatisfying at best, but somehow workable.