Each time Lea gazes at Juliette, she looks as if she might fall into a well of tears.
From the moment the younger sister in “I’ve Loved You So Long” picks up her only sibling at an airport, she is a portrait of skittish longing and muted guilt.
Elsa Zylberstein plays Lea. The astonishing Kristin Scott Thomas is Juliette.
With his remarkable debut feature, French novelist Philippe Claudel delivers a gift of a film about family secrets. It is a tale rich with domestic detail and hope, both evident and desperately unspoken.
The gift-giving started with Zylberstein.
Well known in France, the 40-year-old actress met Claudel three years ago. She is a fan of his novels. “He’s so subtle when he’s writing characters,” she says on the phone from Paris. “There’s no bad and evil. They’re always deep, special and strong. He writes characters with many colors.”
The director recognized something both fragile and powerful in Zylberstein’s film work. (She has been a three- time nominee for France’s Cesar.)
They wound up chatting in a cafe, and two months later, says Zylberstein, she received the script. “He wrote the part for me. It’s the best gift.”
As if to mimic the complicated dance of sibling relationships, much has been written about Thomas’ turn as Juliette.
Oscar buzz
As a woman just released from prison 15 years after committing a crime befitting Greek tragedy, Thomas indeed provides a mesmerizing portrait of pained reserve. It’s easy to be drawn to both the performance and her story. She’s a British actress living in France, appearing in French- language movies.
Yet Lea’s vulnerability is absolutely vital to the exquisite emotion of “I’ve Loved You So Long.” And Zylberstein is a revelation — so much so that she has received Oscar buzz.
“Say it please, say it please,” Zylberstein pleads with a laugh. She’d just returned that morning from Los Angeles. “We had a big press lunch. People were saying that. You have to believe in dreams. Of course, it would be like champagne all night.”
During Juliette’s incarceration, Lea has built a life that seems beautifully solid. There’s husband Luc and the two Vietnamese girls they adopted. She also has a tremendous colleague and friend in Michel, who takes gentle interest in Juliette.
“One is very compelled by the mystery of Juliette. Yet, Lea’s lost as well,” says her portrayer.
“I love to say she was in jail as well, in another way. She’s in jail in her head since Juliette left home. You feel that all her life she’s been depending on her sister.”
“Life is stronger”
It was subtle work, inhabiting that personal prison.
Zylberstein undertook mental gestures. “When the camera was on my eyes, I wanted to be full of things. When Juliette comes back, it’s a tempest, it’s an earthquake. I wanted to bring to the screen some love, some hate, some guilt.”
She also returned Lea to her childhood, to the relationship she and Juliette briefly had.
“I tried to be the little girl I once was in front of her. I played it with flat shoes, no makeup.” No small sacrifice, it turns out.
“Elsa is a young woman who’s always highly elegant, who loves fashion,” Claudel said of Zylberstein. “So I really wanted to break with that image.”
One of the scenes that shows how Lea’s well-constructed life has cracks takes place in the classroom.
Her students are discussing murder and Dostoevsky when she has an outburst. “She doesn’t believe in books anymore; she believes in life,” says Zylberstein.
It’s an intriguing statement for her novelist-director to make, she agrees. “That’s Philippe’s point of view. Sometimes books give us strength. Sometimes they provide solutions. Sometimes they don’t. Life is stronger. Sometimes life is too hard and you can’t find a solution in books.
Lea “is becoming the hero of her own life,” Zylberstein says. “Life is stronger. Life is more interesting.”
