![]() ![]() Her profile subject is the famous (and famously isolated) painter Simon, a rather entitled artist living in the Pyrenees against breathtaking mountain views. Here, the regular book reviewer Coline sports a pixie haircut, hired to write the feature of the month for the women’s magazine she contributes to. But through Bruno Coulais’ stringy score - with Handel’s commanding Sarabande, the famous undercurrent of “Barry Lyndon,” thrown in to propel the mood in brooding depths- Bonitzer seizes a similar taste during this backstory segment. The backward leap and the events that take place within the flashback aren’t exactly David Lynch-level uncanny. Using this conversation as a framing device, Bonitzer takes us three years back, to a launderette where Coline and her beautiful painter neighbor, the often rebelliously shoeless Azar (Iliana Lolic), bicker about life and desire. (The relationship of the two isn’t tidily explained in accordance with the guarded attitude of “Spellbound.”) This mode is palpable moments after the train incident, when Coline come across her longtime friend and colleague Sylvain (Nicolas Maury), recounting her bizarre chance encounter. In that regard, his “Spellbound” is suitably oblique and hypnotic, qualities that will appeal to the same theatrical audience that showed up for Olivier Assayas’ considerably more astute “Personal Shopper” and “The Clouds of Sils Maria.”Įven when it feels like Bonitzer is headed nowhere with this loose, contemporary adaptation of Henry James’ short story “The Way It Came,” his film (co-written by Agnès de Sacy) attractively carries traces of a formal costume drama, fashioned inside a melancholic mold. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the prolific French writer-director - recently of “Right Here Right Now,” another twisty tale where past secrets come to loom large on the present - seems more concerned with aimlessly tiptoeing around death, grief and regret like a ghost, than offering definitive instructions to the living on how to deal with such deeply human troubles. Through this brief foggy encounter and a few minutes of polite yet uncomfortable small talk, we grasp that there is some thorny history there, which Bonitzer’s intriguing yarn unpacks with otherworldly grace, but not always earthbound wisdom or authority. The man that’s appeared out of thin air is none other than Simon ( Nicolas Duvauchelle), who evidently stepped out of the same shuttered subway line. Once her train gets stalled, Coline exits, though almost shockingly unfazed, strolling through the streets until a chance encounter taps her on the shoulder. ![]() Clad in a chic trench coat and styled with a noticeably old-fashioned, side-swept up-do, freelance writer Coline (Sara Giraudeau) is about to hear that ever-unpleasant delay announcement in the Paris metro. A tale of missed connections both earthly and ethereal, Pascal Bonitzer’s haunting “Spellbound” starts underground before it creeps upward to the atmosphere and beyond. ![]()
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