From the Land of the Moon

2016 [FRENCH]

Action / Drama / Romance

13
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 33% · 57 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 62% · 250 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.6/10 10 6979 7K

Please enable your VPΝ when downloading torrents

If you torrent without a VPΝ, your ISP can see that you're torrenting and may throttle your connection and get fined by legal action!

Get Surf VPΝ

Plot summary

In 1950s France, a free-spirited woman trapped in an arranged marriage falls in love with an injured veteran of the Indochinese War.

Director

Top cast

Marion Cotillard as Gabrielle
Louis Garrel as André Sauvage
Michelle Goddet as Médecin
Victoire Du Bois as Jeannine
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
1.08 GB
1280*522
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
2 hr 0 min
Seeds 2
2.23 GB
1920*784
French 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
2 hr 0 min
Seeds 4

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by CinemaSerf 7 / 10

From the Land of the Moon

From an early age, "Gabrielle" (Marion Cotillard) has shown a bit of a rebellious spirit. As a girl, she was determined not to obey her parental wish to marry the local "Jose" (a subtly nuanced effort from Alex Brendemühl) - even though he was quite fond of her, and as a result she lived in the semi-seclusion that befitted an unwed girl in rural France. Her "break" comes in the unlikely form of some kidney stones that necessitates a trip to an Alpine hospital. It's here that she encounters the recovering "André" (Louis Garrel) who has just returned from French Indochina shell-shocked and badly wounded. There's a little of a Wildred Owen poem to this drama, I thought. It shows us the results of the horrors of war, the after effects and trauma, but there's also a degree of hope and optimism as their love story takes shape and maybe, just maybe, there's scope for contentment somewhere. Cotillard is on solid form as the rather self-obsessed and just a bit flaky "Gabrielle" and though Garrel doesn't have so much to do, he still comes across convincingly as a soldier conflicted by a reality and a dream - it's that conclusion that is quite a touching affair, and causes us to have a think about just who "Gabrielle" actually is. The film looks good and is well scored by Daniel Pemberton which all gives a certain lustre to Cotillard's portrayal of a woman I don't think I'd have liked very much.
Reviewed by

Reviewed by dromasca 8 / 10

the right to love

Nicole Garcias is one of the French directors who excels at bringing female and feminist themes to the attention of viewers, while offering the opportunity for consistent leading roles to the actresses who appear in her films. In fact, she is a prolific and talented actress herself. 'Mal de pierres', her 2016 film, proposes such a character and the performance is entrusted to Marion Cotillard, an actress who has not disappointed me in any of the films I have seen her in the last 10-15 years. The book is an adaptation of a novel by the Italian writer Milena Agus, the title being in fact the name used in the middle of the last century for the painful condition that causes kidney stones. In English, by the way, the name sounds even more poetic - 'From the Land of the Moon', a quote from the novel to characterize the behavior of the heroine, providing one of the keys to understanding this film.

What disease does the heroine of the film suffer from? The film begins with a scene that triggers a feedback two decades back, when Gabrielle, the daughter of wealthy farmers in the last grade of high school, falls in love with her literature teacher. Her life seems to be influenced by readings from novels by Emily Brontë and Flaubert, and when her advances are rejected by her teacher (who is married, by the way), her reaction is violent. Is it a mental illness, or a reaction to the stifling environment in the still rather puritanical atmosphere of 1950s France, a few years before political, cultural and sexual revolutions broke out? The forced marriage to Jose, a poor but hard-working and enterprising Catalan imigrant, is imposed on her as an alternative to being admitted to a mental institution. The marriage is unhappy, Jose loves her, but Gabrielle tells him from the start that she will never love him. Arrived at a sanatorium to treat her kidney disease, Gabrielle meets Andre, a severely wounded officer, physically hurt and morally traumatised in the Indochina War. The love story between the two gives the woman an opportunity to recover, maybe even to reach moments of happiness, but it has no chance of ending well.

I won't tell too much about what follows, because the story includes an unexpected turn, which completely changes the viewers' perspective on what they saw on screen. I will only say that the role of Jose played by Alex Brendemühl, an actor with over 100 roles in movies, but about whom I did not know about until now, is much more interesting and consistent than it seems at first glance and that the Catalan actor does a fine job. Marion Cotillard deserves all praises she received for her performance in this film, she is one of the leading actresses in France today, and this complex and interesting role fits her perfectly. Louis Garrel, on the other hand, gets too thin a role - that of the wounded officer Gabrielle falls in love with in the rest house - and fails to be more than an adequate physical presence. It is worth mentioning the excellent cinematogrphy of Christophe Beaucarne, with a special sense of integrating story and characters in nature (the countryside where the story begins, the mountains surrounding the sanatorium, the sea at the shore where Jose builds the house where he hopes to win Gabriella's affection) .

The key to this movie is in my opinion that fact the main character appears in all the scenes, including the flashback scenes. There is no off-screen voice (thanks!), But there is no need either. It is a narrative exposed from the point of view of the woman, of what she sees or what she believe to see, of what she feels in spite of the judgments of those around her. Gabrielle is a woman who claims her right to love at a time and in a place where such aspirations were repressed and severely judged by society. However, love can be found sometimes where we least expect it. Very close to us.

Read more IMDb reviews

1 Comment

Be the first to leave a comment