Thirty-five years after starring together in Loulou as the young standard-bearers of French cinema, Isabelle Huppert and Gerald Depardieu reunite in Guillame Nicloux’s reflective grief drama Valley of Love. Playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves, the film at first seems to want to play off the associations of the actors’ reunion, but this past baggage soon evaporates into the desert heat as the tone turns towards a spiritual examination of concepts like death and grief.
Huppert and Depardieu play characters named Isabelle and Gerard, both French actors who are sufficiently well known that at least one tourist identifies them, but the film veers from reality by having the stars play ex-spouses reunited after the suicide of their estranged adult son Michael. Shortly before his death, Michael sent letters to each of his parents giving them an itinerary for a trip to Death Valley, insisting that his purpose will reveal itself at a certain time in the hottest place on Earth. Isabelle seems to believe that following the instructions will lead to some sort of supernatural reconciliation, while Gerard downplays that hope as foolish while never closing the door on it entirely. These vague hopes are further stoked when each character has an uncanny experience while alone, suggesting that perhaps something supernatural is indeed happening, though Nicloux stages each encounter off-camera, leaving judgment to the audience.
While the characters’ focus turns to intangible spiritual matters, Nicloux keeps the camera locked in on the actors’ physical presences, following them with long tracking shots, making the audience aware of every drip of sweat caused by the hellish heat, and highlighting the changes that have come over the actors. With Huppert these changes are subtler, her brittle personality is closer to the surface, as evidenced in several hilarious encounters with gregarious Americans, while Depardieu’s shirtless bulk fills the frame and inspires him to nostalgia for his younger body. Even though Michael’s death reunited them, their grief for him is extremely abstract due to barely knowing him as an adult; Isabelle and Gerard are really mourning for their younger selves. Amidst the desert backdrop, they ruminate on the possibility of change and the choices that have given them freedom but trapped them inescapably inside themselves.
Valley of Love intrigues, but never delivers on its potential. Even with such talented actors, the characters remain remote and their relationship is not compelling enough to support an entire film. The film is teasingly metaphysical, offering just enough for the audience to come up with their own theories on what happens that Nicloux doesn’t seem to have himself. It’s never quite bad, but never that good either, merely a diverting ninety minutes spent in the desert with Huppert and Depardieu.
