Compared to the pretty, petite likes of Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine Sagnier, Audrey Tautou, and other young French starlets, Emmanuelle Devos seems as curious anomalous as Katharine Hepburn or Giulietta Masina. Everything on her wide-open face seems almost comically broad—with those oversized eyes and cheekbones, and teeth that could puncture the hull of an aircraft carrier—yet she controls every muscle like a marionette. That face tells a lot of the story in Gilles' Wife, an impeccable minimalist drama that's tailored specifically to Devos' expressive capabilities, which say more than the sparse dialogue. Playing a dowdy housewife and mother spurned by a cheating husband, Devos is the vessel that carries the film's immense tension, which can only be resolved through a decision that she keeps close to the vest. With a lesser actress in the lead, the delicate simplicity of Frédéric Fonteyne's brittle melodrama might have seemed merely slight.
Beautifully photographed in autumn browns and yellows, Gilles' Wife evokes the hardscrabble world of a small French mining town in the 1930s, where working-class families grind out a living from the local foundry. The mother of two little girls with a third child on the way, Devos stands by helplessly as her husband, Clovis Cornillac, pursues an indiscreet affair with her conventionally gorgeous younger sister Laura Smet. The pain and humiliation caused by their betrayal runs against her instincts as a wife and mother, which lean toward stability and steadfast devotion. In fact, when the relationship between Cornillac and Smet goes sour, Devos is there to comfort her husband and carry him through his anguish and violent spasms of jealousy. And yet she isn't quite a doormat: She knows that she needs to take definitive action of some sort, but it's a question of what and when.
Like Fontayne's elegant previous feature Une Liaison Pornographique (released here under the memorably clumsy title An Affair Of Love), about a no-strings-attached sexual relationship that grows into something more, Gilles' Wife proceeds with an air of detached curiosity. The emotions are intense yet unnaturally bottled-up, and the characters, particularly Devos, don't deliver the immediate response that the situation would seem to dictate. There's an almost perverse masochism to Devos consoling Cornillac like a child straying from the flock when she by all rights should collapse into raging histrionics. When she finally decides how to act, her solution could be read as either defiant or passive, but it's chilling under any interpretation.