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I've Loved You So Long

• Directed and written by Philippe Claudel
• Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein
• Classification: 14A
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Most screen actors are competent, but few are great. So most are at the mercy of their material, capable of rising to the challenge of a good script, yet doomed to fall to the level of a bad one. Yes, a skilled actor can sometimes enliven a dud picture - that's fairly common. But only rarely, very rarely, does a performance not only dominate our attention but actually elevate a film beyond its intrinsic merit. Without Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long would be a watchable but hardly a memorable movie. With her, it's both - she so fully inhabits the character that everyone and everything around her are simply enhanced.

More remarkable still, Scott Thomas does this in her second language. The setting is the French city of Nancy, and we first meet Juliette at the airport, looking - pale skin, thin lips, dull eyes, mousey brown hair - like the displaced person she is. Trailing behind her are the past 15 years spent in prison for the crime of murdering her young son, the circumstances of which become the mystery that permeates the rest of the story - its secrets doled out incrementally. For now, in these early frames, this much is clear: Juliette may have been released, but, judged by her appearance, she's far from free.

No, the woman has erected a wall around herself that, built from the bricks of sombre silence and passive indifference, seems impregnable. By contrast, her younger sister, Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), is all chirpy high spirits, excited to meet her at the airport, eager to invite her into the stable home she shares with a loyal husband and their two adopted children. During Juliette's incarceration, Lea was prevented by their parents from having any contact with the disgraced sibling. Now, she's determined to make amends, offering as proof her relentless good cheer. But that optimism might just be a different kind of wall, a brighter sort of cell.

Indeed, interior prisons dot the mental landscape here. Philippe Claudel is a first-time director, but he is also a veteran novelist with a writer's interest in the mind's various enclosures. Sometimes, it's an afflicted brain that issues the verdict and passes the sentence. For example, Lea's father-in-law has been left mute by a stroke, and whiles away his days holed up behind a rampart of books, which he reads obsessively with his face frozen into a perpetual smile. As asylums go, his seems quite benign.

Not so for the sisters' surviving parent - their mother sits behind a different set of bars. She's in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, and doesn't even recognize Lea any more. But, in a strange yet powerful sequence, the bars seem to disappear when Juliette pays her a visit after such a prolonged absence. The mother greets her excitedly by name, then hugs her tightly, but, in the old woman's confusion, the daughter she's embracing is not Juliette the convicted murderer but Juliette the innocent child - after 15 years of separation, her act of forgiveness is just another cruel trick from a damaged mind.

Watch Scott Thomas's face during this scene, flickering in mere seconds from wariness to surprise to bafflement to disappointment and then back to its default setting of blank indifference. Her entire performance is a study in these nuanced gradations of expression. In her earlier work, she has certainly proved her range - from the sensuous beauty in The English Patient to the repressed schoolmarm in Angels and Insects is itself an impressive stretch. Yet here, speaking her fluent if slightly accented French, Scott Thomas must paint Juliette on an essentially barren canvas.

In fact, complicating matters further, her emotional sterility isn't just the starting point but the basic foundation of the character. Whatever the future might hold - and, to some degree, this is an optimistic tale of rebirth - the tragic event in her past is inescapable, its residue permanent. Consequently, Scott Thomas must convey a hopeful opening of the cell door - a tender glance, a spontaneous laugh, a spark of passion - without negating the inevitable, lingering presence of the cell itself. She does so superbly, credibly lightening the tragedy but not denying or sentimentalizing it.

The supporting cast lives up to their name - seamlessly natural, they support her throughout. But the script does not. The mystery's solution is doubly annoying in that (1) it's too easy and predictable and (2) its simplicity raises more questions than it answers. This is the kind of cheap resolution that, casting doubt on the credibility of the story's previous developments, is merely distracting and almost keeps the film from earning its affective payoff. Almost, because Scott Thomas in the last frame redeems matters, freeing us from the plot's dangling threads and returning our focus to Juliette's loosened yet still encircling shackles. Ultimately, the plot rings false, but, thanks to an actor's rare talent, those shackles feel painfully and potently real.