La vie promise – Ghost River (2002)

Directed by: Olivier Dahan | 89 minutes | drama | Actors: Isabelle Huppert, Maud Forget, Pascal Greggory, Fabienne Babe, André Marcon, Rémy Roubakha, Janine Souchon

Some people seem to have been born by accident. Such a person is Sylvia, a prostitute who has long been at peace with the fact that life sucks. If the accident doesn’t happen to her, she helps it herself by always getting in trouble with her big mouth. She doesn’t want to know anymore that she had known a better past. She effectively avoids the responsibility of true love.

Until the accident determines that she and her daughter Laurence have to live together, on the run. This fact makes Ghost River or La Vie Promise, as the original French title is, a kind of road movie. The ladies are on their way to Sylvia’s old love, the one person Sylvia is sure will always accept her as she is.

Sylvia and Laurence first travel that road together, but halfway through they part ways because mother Sylvia is more like a child than daughter Laurence. The fact that the two find each other again is thanks to a mysterious person, Joshua (Pascal Greggory). This man encounters both Sylvia and Laurence on their lonely journey and offers them a lift. Finally, the three of them continue after Sylvia and Laurence have found each other again. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that Joshua himself is also hiding a lot of corpses in the closet. Thus, these three persons are on a journey together, but mainly on a journey to fight their own demons.

The English title ‘Ghost River’ refers to the ghost river, a (rather obscure) metaphor for the good memories of life as it should be: the memories of childhood, memories that we often forget in the course of our lives. For Sylvia, the journey and quest for Piotr is actually a quest for that ghost river, for life as it could and should have been.

It is not clear why she strayed from that path. In any case, it was not up to Piotr. He got Sylvia out of the pit, they even had a son together, and after her return to the wicked life of Nice, he still hasn’t wanted to give her up. It is one of the many ambiguities in La Vie Promise, and that does the film no good. While ample attention is given to the search and the difficult character of Sylvia, the attention for Laurence and Joshua remains rather limited. Laurence’s seizures and Joshua’s criminal activities are disclosed but not explained. Joshua’s reasons for helping the two ladies also remain unclear: self-interest, pity, infatuation?

Moreover, there are too many unexplained coincidences in the story. Coincidentally, Joshua runs into both Sylvia and Laurence; coincidentally, Sylvia had left her purse with him so Laurence knows that Joshua has already met her; coincidentally, Sylvia has the presence of mind to go to the hospital where she was once admitted; and coincidentally the sister, who recognizes her, is willing to give Sylvia’s file to her so that Sylvia can reminisce. The unbalanced attention and coincidences don’t make the story very believable, let alone that you really sympathize with the characters.

Director Olivier Dahan may have deliberately chosen to focus primarily on Sylvia, and Isabelle Huppert knows how to exploit that well. This attention to Sylvia is especially evident in slow, silent scenes in which Sylvia’s face shows all the indifference, pain, effort and sorrow she has incurred in her life.

Huppert acts very well, that’s certainly not the reason. Yet the ambiguities remain too much to really reward good acting with a sense of real involvement with Sylvia. Only once do you feel something of Sylvia’s almost aimless search, but those are not entirely coincidentally the scenes in which Sylvia’s expressions are supported by the beautiful, melancholic music of Lucinda Williams. At other times you remain unmoved or, worse, the film comes across as too sentimental.
What remains is on the one hand an interesting film: well acted by Isabelle Huppert, beautifully filmed, and at times compelling. On the other hand, Ghost River is primarily a film that is too unbalanced and too unbelievable to call it a good film.