Direction: Mathieu Amalric
Country: France
Touching on loss and grief, this puzzle of a film directed by Mathieu Amalric, who is better known as an actor (The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, 2007; The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014), is based on a contemporary play. The film stars Vicky Krieps (The Phantom Thread, 2017) as a woman who apparently tries to reconnect with her family after leaving them. Bafflingly structured, the story points out an ambiguous direction that can only be clarified as the film progresses.
The flashbacks sometimes confound us more, and the film purposely plunges us into constant dualities - reality and imagination, presence and absence, happiness and sadness - which requires patience. It’s all very intensely cerebral rather than powerfully emotional.
Despite the pleasant frames, I found Hold Me Tight vapid in the assemblage and lethargic in pace, marked by a fluctuating narrative that, not being easy to follow, is not so unique or even unapproachable. The thing for me was that the strong premise gradually weakens with a series of subtleties that keep breaking the fragmentation to reach a conclusion. Even with Krieps infusing the required gravitas and the beautiful piano pieces composed by Beethoven and Schönberg, the film failed to move me profoundly. It ended without much of a payoff.
