Toutes ces belles promesses (All the Fine Promises). 2003. France/Belgium. Written and directed by Jean-Paul Civeyrac. Based on the novel Hymnes à l'amour by Anne Wiazemsky. With Jeanne Balibar, Bulle Ogier, Renaud Bécard. DCP courtesy Pyramide Films. In French; English subtitles. 85 min.
Filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt writes, “Jean Paul Civeyrac’s Toutes ces belles promesses is a musical without songs orchestrated to a Mendelssohn soundtrack. A romantic film with a paradoxically realistic, almost clinical perspective on pain and loneliness, Promesses traces the steps of a Parisian cellist (Jeanne Balibar), dumped by her orchestra-mate lover, whose emotional distress leads her to explore her memories of her turbulent family life and to travel to the provinces to seek out her dead father’s mistress (Bulle Ogier). Civeyrac’s light touch with heavy material and his musical sensibility made me think first of Ophuls, but Civeyrac is much more subjective and impressionistic, and consequently more predisposed to close-ups. With its theatrical dialogue filtered through Balibar’s graceful, sing-song delivery, Promesses is probably closer in tone to the sad comedies that Michel Deville and Nina Companéez created in the ’60s and early ’70s. Certainly it’s been a while since any filmmaker saw fit to express the joys and sorrows of the human condition through the very serious business of women trying on hats.”