MA SAISON PRÉFÉRÉE Movie Review

My Favorite Season

Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) is a lawyer whose reserved and “civilized” persona is being challenged daily by the swelling tensions and increasingly unavoidable dissatisfactions of her marriage. Her brother Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a doctor and confirmed bachelor who refuses to conceal his disgust for family life and bourgeois hypocrisy, is Emilie's polar opposite. Though these estranged siblings have had contact with each other only rarely in their adult years, that situation changes radically when their aging mother begins to show unmistakable signs of being unable to care for herself any longer. Even Ma Saison Préférée had merely been an adequate domestic melodrama, director André Téchiné would have probably struck a receptive nerve among baby boomer audiences simply because so many of them are now caring for newly dependent parents. But far from being merely adequate, Ma Saison Préférée is one of the subtlest, most insightful, most delicately nuanced portraits of repressed family tensions ever made. Blessedly unpreachy, unmanipulative, and unpredictable, this is 124 minutes of powerful and affecting family therapy wrapped in the glittering and brilliantly honest performances of Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil. It's one of the finest films in the career of Téchiné, a director whose extraordinary output has remained largely unseen in the United States.

NEXT STOP … Scene of the Crime, Wild Reeds, Thieves (Les Voleurs)

1993 124m/C FR Daniel Auteuil, Catherine Deneuve, Marthe Villalonga, Jean-Pierre Bouvier, Chiara Mastroianni, Anthony Prada, Carmen Chaplin; D: Andre Techine; W: Andre Techine; C: Thierry Arbogast; M: Philippe Sarde. VHS, Letterbox FXL