Philippe Garrel - Le coeur fantôme AKA The Phantom Heart (1996)

A hangdog, middle-aged painter falls in love with a tender young college student after he leaves his philandering wife and his children in this romantic French drama. To console himself, the fundamentally bohemian Phillippe finds comfort in the arms of various prostitutes, especially Valeria. It is while searching for her that he meets lovely Justine, the student. Sparks fly and they move into together. Things go well until Phillippe begins pining for his children. This makes insecure Justine terribly jealous and tumult erupts until the aging artist is able to discover the true source of his anxieties.





Although painfully slow-moving and awkwardly introspective in places, Le Coeur fantôme offers a convincing portrait of a man caught up in a mid-life crisis, uncertain of his future and scarcely able to comprehend his past. Its director, Philippe Garrel, projects onto the film his own painful real-life experiences, and even reinforces the auto-biographical element by casting his father in the role of the principal character’s father. Markedly different in style to most contemporary French dramas, this film has a distinctive brooding intensity and dark existentialist poetry which sets it part, but at the risk of alienating those spectators who prefer films to have greater narrative coherence and less ambiguity. Overall, it is an enigmatic but not entirely satisfying film. (James Travers, filmsdefrance.com)







El corazón fantasma
Tras su separación de Anne, con quien comparte dos hijos, el pintor Philippe conoce en la calle a Justine, una mujer más joven que él, con la que inicia una relación. A pesar de que Philippe asegura que Justine ha sido su salvación, ella siente que no puede competir con la nostalgia de su vida anterior y se muestra cada vez más celosa de su ex mujer y sus hijos.



Philippe est peintre. Marié et père de deux enfants, il se sépare de sa femme le jour ou il découvre qu'elle a un amant. Malgré sa rencontre avec une jeune femme, il ne peut se débarrasser de sa culpabilité d'avoir laissé ses enfants à leur mère. Il entreprend alors de découvrir pourquoi ses parents s'étaient jadis eux aussi séparés.





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