Trilingual ‘Gentle Monster’ Is Impressively Discomfiting

Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster” is not a foreign language film. It is, rather, a film that employs three languages: English, French and German. A sensible approach, you might suppose since our lead, Lucy Weiss (Léa Seydoux), is French, her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) is Austrian, and English is well, it’s the lingua franca now, isn’t it? The majority of “Gentle Monster” takes place in the German countryside with a significant pit-stop made at the city apartment of Lucy’s mother, Eloise (Catherine Deneuve). Though Eloise lives in Germany, her immediate surroundings and colleagues are sehr French. Kind of confusing.More confusing is the promiscuous manner in which the dialogue flits between the three languages. English, French and German are evenly distributed among not only the protagonists but also supporting and minor players. This tic is keyed not so much to character or plot, but, it seems, a misguided internationalism. Maybe the producers and Ms. Kreutzer, who also wrote the screenplay, set a goal to please some of the people a third of the time? Whatever the case, there’s a resulting falsity that nags at this effort, a distance prompted by contrivance.Machinations of this sort are an enemy of fiction, and “Gentle Monster” is hobbled by distraction. Which isn’t to say that Ms. Kreutzer’s picture doesn’t unsettle or isn’t involving: The director’s humanitas ultimately overrides her self-consciousness. The movie was prompted by a 2020 news story reported in the German press about a police round-up of a group involved in the online distribution of child pornography. When an actor in her previous film “Corsage” (2022), Florian Teichtmeister, pled guilty to similar charges, Ms. Kreutzer thought twice but then went ahead to tell the tale of a family rent asunder by unspeakable desires.The press materials accompanying “Gentle Monster” feature an introductory note by Orna Guralnik, a Brooklyn-based psychoanalyst many of us know from the Showtime series “Couples Therapy.” The good doctor notes that “when a loved one is accused of something monstrous, the mind does not calmly weigh evidence, it fights, it struggles to protect the coherence of everything it has already invested.” Such is Lucy’s dilemma when she comes down the stairs of her German villa to find the police rounding up both her husband and his tech stuff. Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase, best known on these shores as the star of a Netflix series, “Kleo”), is one of the officers on the scene, a young woman whose officious demeanor can’t disguise a troubled soul.Officer Kühn’s travails with a father suffering from dementia comprise a subplot that, though deft in its details, is awkwardly wedged into the proceedings. Still, Ms. Haase’s character serves as emotional ballast to Lucy, whose world is upended when she learns that Philip may be involved with watching, distributing and making child pornography. Uppermost in Lucy’s mind is how all of this will play out with the couple’s young son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet). Philip is, from all appearances, a loving and generous father, but a mother’s love has its limits.“Gentle Monster” is a difficult film that doesn’t stoop to sensation and makes a point of, if not moral ambiguity, then the difficulties of navigating harsh and contradictory states of mind. Ms. Deneuve is only briefly at hand, but she makes her presence felt as a willfully independent woman and, not unrelated, a peripatetic mother. Ms. Kreutzer’s gift for cinematic rhythm is stronger than her hold on narrative structure, but she’s aided in this venture by Ms. Seydoux, an actress of consummate gifts who is as ragged as she is full-bodied in what must have been an exhausting role to embody. The combined efforts of all involved make for an impressively discomfiting watch.

Trilingual ‘Gentle Monster’ Is Impressively Discomfiting

Trilingual ‘Gentle Monster’ Is Impressively Discomfiting

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