“He not busy being born is busy dying.” Bob Dylan’s oft-quoted 1965 lyric could well serve as a plot summary for Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s first French-language feature, “Éternité,” which trains a painterly eye (and a fetish for immaculate production design) on three generations of an enormous aristocratic family that stays busy doing little else. Featuring an embarrassment of great actresses (Audrey Tautou, Mélanie Laurent, Bérénice Bejo, Irène Jacob) near-silently emoting for the camera as their characters process constant birth and death for the better part of two hours, “Éternité” is a meditative, gorgeous-looking film imbued with such gentle sensitivity that it’s difficult to dislike. Starting somewhere in France in the 19th century — at least judging by the costumes and decor, as no other geographic or chronological signifiers are to be found — the film begins with the childhood of Valentine (Tautou), who grows up on an immaculate mansion above an expansive garden. (It’s a setting that DP Mark Lee Ping Bing’s expert camerawork will explore nook-and-cranny, which is good, since the film rarely ever leaves it.) After finding a husband and giving birth to more than half a dozen children, Valentine then watches as nearly all of them die untimely deaths of unspecified illnesses, at which point the focus shifts to her surviving son Henri (Jérémie Renier) and his wife Mathilde (Laurent). Like her mother-in-law, Mathilde also produces bountiful offspring, and Mathilde’s bosom friend Gabrielle (Bejo) does likewise with her husband Charles (Pierre Deladonchamps). Many more picturesque deaths follow, interspersed with many dialogue-free, slow-motion scenes of adorable children and good-looking adults basking cherubically in the golden sunlight, or striding gallantly through impeccably decorated hallways.
And that’s essentially it. What these people are like, how they pass the time, how they really feel about each other, what they talk about, where they live, and how they relate to the progress of modern history that is presumably occurring outside their mansion are details of little importance to this film. At one point, almost teasingly, Tran begins to sketch a curious sort of relationship between Gabrielle and Mathilde, who are freely physically affectionate with one another, and visit every single evening. But then a solemn voiceover informs us, “No one knows what they talked about. And they’re all dead now.”
Tran’s sheer skill as a filmmaker ensures that some of these births and deaths land with great poignancy. For example, shortly after Valentine sends her oldest boys, identical twins, off to an unspecified war, we see the arrival of a government communiqué that clearly augers bad news, and as the camera lingers on the letter, we notice that there are two identical ones. Yet so often are these sorts of scenes repeated that it becomes safe to assume any child seen bedridden with an artfully applied sheen of sweat, or even lingered upon in closeup longer than the others, will no longer be a part of the film going forward.
“Eternité” will be screened on 17 Feb 2017, 8 pm and Sun 19 Feb 2017, 6 pm at L’Espace, 24 Trang Tien, Hanoi.