Hold Me Tight: Vicky Krieps Shines as a Woman Divided and Haunted
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
In the dreamlike French drama, Hold Me Tight, the actress Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Corsage) plays a mother, Clarisse.
One morning, Clarisse looks at some Polaroid photos of her family, takes a farewell gaze at her sleeping husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), and their children, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet) and Paul (Sacha Ardilly). She then climbs into her late ‘70s AMC Pacer and leaves them. Marc and the children awake and start getting ready for school. The kids complain they want their mother to make them hot chocolate but nobody seems unduly worried.
Vicky Krieps is a mom on the run for mysterious reasons in Hold Me Tight.
As the film progresses through its first half hour, Clarisse visits an old friend at a service station and then drives on. There are hints that not all is as it seems. At one point, she writes in her journal: “I’m inventing. I imagine that I left.”
We watch parallel scenes of her on her road trip, and her family going on with their lives. There are suggestions that the family remains telepathically connected. As her son, Paul, ducks under the soap bubbles in the bathtub at home, Clarisse presses her face down onto a pile of shaved ice at a supermarket. While her husband looks at his hairy chest and grasps his love handles in the bathroom mirror, Clarisse talks to a stranger at a bar, then unexpectedly unbuttons the man’s shirt and begins touching his chest.
What is going on? Months, then years, pass. Lucie and Paul grow older and are replaced by adolescent actors (Juliette Benveniste and Aurèle Grzesik). Lucie, who plunked out simple scales and a halting version of Für Elise on the piano as a child, becomes a teen-aged virtuoso musician.
The children do not see their mother again, but sometimes her voice speaks to them and to her husband and they answer her. “Who are you speaking to?” Paul asks his father. “No one,” says Marc. “But you’re talking!” Paul replies.
This unsettling and puzzling marital drama is directed by Mathieu Amalric, a leading French actor (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Quantum of Solace) who sometimes doubles as a director. Hold Me Tight, his sixth feature, is adapted from a play by Claudine Galea, in a way that’s fluidly cinematic, with shifting flashbacks and future projections, shifting subtly between reverie and real life.
The settings — a handsome rural house in southwest France, road-side diners and inns, and the changing seasons, are physically specific. But the world of the film is also stylized, with its Van Gogh blue-and-orange colour palette, domestic scenes that take on a gossamer quality, and a soundtrack that features a progressively more complex classical and urgent music score.
There is a limit to how long an audience can continue in a state of uncertainty about the characters’ behavior. And the camera’s observational distance, is revealed about a third of the way into the film. (I’m tempted to say, it’s not what you think but then, how would I know what you think?).
To say more would undermine the uncanny trance-like mixture of reality and imagination that Amalric achieves. Once the revelation is made, the film sheds its suggestions of the supernatural, and becomes more a portrait of Clarisse’s psychological state, gradually building toward a second concluding climax.
Narratively, the film’s last two thirds feel somewhat scattered, or perhaps “shattered” is a better word to reflect the catastrophe at the center of the story. The key to holding these fragments together, and avoiding making the movie’s grim turn unbearable, is the deeply fascinating performance of Vicky Krieps as Clarisse.
The Luxembourg-born actress, who first came to prominence as the destructive muse to Daniel Day-Lewis dress designer in The Phantom Thread, keeps finding ways to reveal how complex and dualistic a character can be. Last year, she starred in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. And this year, she gave a brilliant performance in Austria’s Oscar nominee, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, an anachronistic biopic about the Hapsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria whose pedestal becomes a prison.
In Hold Me Tight, Krieps gives us a character who seems to be living in two dimensions, simultaneously in the present physical moment and mentally in the past, future and imaginary. She’s a ghost, haunting the dream of her own life.
Hold Me Tight. Directed by Mathieu Amalric, written by Mathieu Amalric based on a play by Claudine Galea. Starring Vicky Krieps and Arieh Worthalter. Now playing at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox.