Filmmaker Mathieu Amalric's sixth feature, an adaptation of Claudine Galea's unproduced play Je Reviens de Loin, centers on a woman attempting to get on with her life after her family disappears in an avalanche.
As the film begins, Clarisse (Phantom Thread's Vicki Krieps) wakes up at dawn, gets dressed, silently bids each family member goodbye, and drives away in her 1978 Pacer. Amalric proceeds to crosscut between Clarisse on her own, her family without her in the present, and her life in the past, before and after she and Marc (Arieh Worthalter) had children.
In the car, she sings along to the radio (J.J. Cale's breezy "Cherry," which also plays at the end), listens to a tape of her daughter practicing piano scales, and holds up her side of imaginary conversations. For the first leg of her trip, she doesn’t seem particularly depressed, and nor does her family seem all that worried about her.
At a bar, though, Clarisse laments that Marc hasn't called. The next time Amalric catches up with her, she's taken a new job in a new town. Things seem stable for the moment, but then Marc throws all of her toiletries into a laundry basket, and her son Paul (Sacha Ardilly) has a fit, screaming, "You threw away her perfumes, you threw Mom away!"
Amalric then switches gears when Clarisse reports her husband and children missing. At first, it seems as if she's delusional, except there's a hotel room filled with family belongings to back her up, which casts everything the director has shown in a different light. As Clarisse tells her absent family via voiceover, "I'm not the one who left. I made it up. That way you’re here."
While snow covers the Pyrenees, she imagines things that never happened, like her daughter, Lucie (Juliette Benveniste), now a teenager, applying to a music conservatory, or Marc and Paul (now played by Aurèle Grzesik) building a treehouse. The motherless trio also makes breakfast together, has friends over for dinner, paints the walls--and moves on with their lives.
Once spring arrives and the snow melts, rescuers definitively determine what happened to Clarisse's family. Until then, she lives suspended between hope and hopelessness. She has no proof that they're dead, and so she can't (and doesn't want to) mourn, even though the chances of their survival are negligible.
Much like the recent Corsage, this is mostly a one-woman show for Vicki Krieps. Though some scenes take place without her--even as she narrates them--it's all about what she imagines, what she remembers, and what she does. It's a tricky balancing act since Clarisse can appear disturbed, not because she's mentally ill, but because the sudden, intangible loss has destabilized her.
If Hold Me Tight isn't completely successful--like the central character, the tone bobs and weaves--actor-turned-director Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Quantum of Solace), who knows a thing or two about acting, finds a uniquely non-melodramatic way to explore memory and loss.
What type of library programming could use this title?
Library programming on contemporary French cinema, the work of Vicki Krieps, or the films of Mathieu Amalric, like his 2010 Cannes Film Festival award winner On Tour, would find a fine choice in Hold Me Tight.
What kind of film series would this narrative feature fit in?
Hold Me Tight would fit with film series on loss, memory, and mourning, like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now or Todd Field's In the Bedroom, in which parents deal, in different ways, with the sudden loss of their children.