La Femme qui boit.

2001 90m prod ACPAV, p Bernadette Payeur, disc Bernard Emond, ph Jean--Claude Labrecque, ed Louise Cote, ad Andre-Line Beauparlant, ed Hugo Brochu, Martin Allard; with Elyse Guilbault, Luc Picard, Michel Forget, Gills Renaud, Lise Castonguay, Fanny Malette, Laurent Lacoursiere, Alexandrine Agostini.

La Femnme qui boit opens on a close shot of a grey-haired woman sitting with her back to us in a small, dark, desolate room. In voice--over she begins to tell us, slowly, deliberately, the story of her life, which ended, for all intents and purposes, with a fire that cost her her son and what little happiness she knew.

The woman is Paulette. Born on a small piece of land some-where in the vicinity of Montreal, she travelled to the big city as an adolescent. Once there she found work in a factory in the poor neighbourhood of Hochelaga, spending her nights perfecting a tap-dance routine that she performed regularly in a small cabaret. One night, a judge is present for her routine and is charmed. She becomes the older man's lover and moves into a fully financed apartment in Outremont - that she is not allowed to leave in daylight nor make phone calls from - to become his kept mistress.

She lives this bourgeois life for 15 years before becoming overwrought by it and deciding to make her own way with a bartender named Frank. She leaves the judge, sells her expensive furniture, and marries the dandy Frank in order for him to avoid conscription in the Second World War. During the course of their relationship, Paulette informs us she only had Frank to herself for a period of five months, when he was housebound because of an illness. She loves him like she never loved anyone else and has his child, but he is a wanderer. He spends days without coming home, smells like other women and humiliates her publicly with his constant flirtations. Paulette takes to the bottle.

By the time her son is seven, Paulette has become undone. Her drinking takes over her life, and the boy begins spending more and more time at the neighbours. The film's central action focuses on the two days after Frank leaves her for good. Paulette stops going out and orders her booze in from a corner store. She makes phone calls to Frank's mistress's home, pleading drunkenly with him to return. She shuns her family and her son, who she believes judges her. One night she passes out in the bathroom and a cigarette she has knocked over sets the house on fire. Her son is taken away by the authorities, and she is bounced around from institution to institution for the rest of her days, left to wait for, with diminishing patience, her welcome death.

There are moments of great beauty in this film. Constructed as a series of vignettes - some set in the 1950s, some set in the 1930s, some silent, others with dialogue - La Femme qui boit builds its portrait of despair in increments. The film lays out the tragedy of the character's life immediately; we are informed in the first minute that this woman has no life to speak of, is a shell of her former self, and that the following story is of her breakdown. The oncoming tragedy is therefore expected; we study it objectively, clinically, for the next 90 minutes.

Scenes of crisis are interwoven with scenes of daily drudgery and familial life to form a seamless tapestry. Snippets of Paulette's (Elyse Guilbault) progressive slippage down the perilous slope of alcohol abuse and decrepitude are intertwined carefully with moments of glee - cherished times of connection with her son Rene (Laurent Lacoursiere), moments of tenderness with her philandering husband Frank (Luc Picard) - giving the character true roundness. The camera stays close on her for most of the film, simply watching, sometimes from behind her shoulder, sometimes from across the room. All the scenes are interior, giving physical veracity to her emotional claustrophobia.

Elyse Guilbault, whose past work has been mainly in the theatre, gives a deep, palpable performance as Paulette, only interrupted by very occasional moments of over-expressiveness, not quite taking into account the close proximity of the watching eye. Picard's performance as Frank is also excellent, and the young Lacoursiere's few moments on the screen as Rene are impressive. Memorable scenes include both the tragic and the ordinary, such as when Paulette and Rene squirm around on his bedroom floor, giggling and tickling one another, or another, in which Paulette, alone in her kitchen and too drunk to stand without support by mid-afternoon, nearly burns her hair off when lighting a cigarette off her gas stove. Moments of silence are particularly strong. Fleeting looks and listless reveries are some of the most trenchant episodes: Paulette unconscious on her bed, empty glass in hand, in various states of undress; teetering, precariously balanced on her living-room couch late at night; or a scene when, eight mo nths pregnant, she reaches under her pillow to pull out a mickey.

Guilbault moves effortlessly from scene to scene, chronological moment to moment, transmuting convincingly from a woman in her 20s - perhaps slightly cynical but still filled with the glimmer of hope - to a woman in her 40s, long since broken. There is a subtlety to the emotional landscape director Bernard Emond paints, letting the pastels of silence blend freely with the fiery hues of drama. The film's quietness and the short, black pauses between scenes, gives it an aura of realistic ordinariness and is one of its best features.

This being said, some things, unfortunately, break irremediably with La Femme's attempted sophistication. The voice-over narration feels, for the most part, unnecessary and irritating, and the maddening slowness of enunciation and the monotony of intonation feel tired and false. The philosophical poetics uttered diminish the poetry of the images. There are enough emotive messages in the characters' small gestures not to warrant the simplistic musings. The film's structure, too, has some faults, such as the introduction of an adolescent Paulette (Fanny Malette) in the film's last quarter. Although Malette did a satisfactory job emulating Guilbault's mannerisms and her presence explains much of the character's past, the slow rhythm of the film and the dire subject matter made the progression toward the climax difficult to bear, and with the introduction of flashbacks at such a late stage felt excessive and exhausting.

Were it not for the voice-over and flashbacks, La Femme qui boit would be a better film, an impressive piece of psychological portraiture and an unusually subtle formal feat. As it is, it remains only a small step away.