Mathieu Amalric has been one of France’s most respected actors over the past quarter-century, not only giving impressive performances in films directed by Arnaud Despleschin (My Sex Life… and A Christmas Tale), Roman Polanski (Venus in Fur), Alain Resnais (Wild Grass) and Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but also making a successful transition to Hollywood blockbusters, notably in Steven Spielberg’s Munich and playing the villain in the 007 film Quantum of Solace.

 

But Amalric has also quietly become one of France’s most accomplished filmmakers over the past decade, culminating in his superb recent features: the tense, nail-biting thriller The Blue Room and the intimate biopic Barbara, starring Amalric’s ex-wife, Jeanne Balibar.

 

Amalric’s latest directorial effort, Hold Me Tight, is his own adaptation of a play by Claudine Galea. He does not appear onscreen, instead leaving the heavy lifting almost entirely to Vicky Krieps, the immensely talented Luxembourgian actress who plays the lead. Although she isn’t onscreen for every scene, it seems like she is. 

 

The story of Clarisse, a wife and mother who wakes up early one morning, gets in her car and drives away, leaving behind her befuddled husband, Marc, and their two young children, Lucie and Paul, is dominated by Clarisse’s depressed mindset: is she merely fantasizing about what her family might be doing without her or is Amalric crosscutting between Clarisse and the family she left behind?

 

On a basic level, Hold Me Tight is a tale of a grief-stricken mother who has trouble coming to terms with her decision to leave her home, but never returns. The children grow up—Lucie becomes a talented pianist—sans mother but with their sometimes bumbling but well-meaning father.

 

On a deeper level, however, the movie is something else entirely, which is unsurprising coming from Amalric, who displayed the same artistry and daring in The Blue Room, a film about adultery and death in which he starred as a cheating husband whose wife and whose lover’s husband both die suspiciously. That film’s fractured narrative pointedly entered its protagonist’s confused mind: is he culpable in the killings or was he duped by his lover? 

 

The answer, which arrives definitively late in the film, might be labeled a gimmick, but Amalric does sprinkle in clues from the very opening scene, when Clarisse angrily throws down polaroids she’s been looking at that show her happy family. As Clarisse, Krieps gives a magisterial, totally committed performance. 

 

Rarely has a performer conveyed painful sorrow in such a restrained but forceful manner: like the luminous actresses in Ingmar Bergman’s great chamber dramas focused on the female psyche, Krieps’ unflinching, total immersion in her character brims with real life as it is lived, however bewildering and difficult that may be.

 

Amalric’s assured directing, which underlines Krieps’ towering performance, astutely uses nondiegetic sound to keep us off-kilter, as what we hear and what we see don’t always line up perfectly, mirroring Clarissa’s own mindset. This holds especially true when Clarisse’s voiceover provides a haunting effect, as in the scenes of Marc and the children that have Clarisse speaking to them but they do not hear her. 

 

There’s also Amalric’s expressive use of music, which he also displayed in his previous two films. The Blue Room brilliantly used a brittle chamber-orchestra score by Gregoire Hetzel that adroitly gave way, at the chilling ending, to a perfectly chosen Bach-Busoni piano piece. Barbara, about an actress playing the popular French chanteuse, was awash in songs. Hold Me Tight, in which daughter Lucie plays the piano, has music woven right into the fabric of the story.

 

Legendary pianist Martha Argerich (who also performs on the soundtrack) figures in the film as someone Lucie aspires to—the teenager even dyes her hair silver to match the Argentine performer’s look—and Amalric has composed his entire film to the checks and balances of the often intense and propulsive keyboard works he has chosen. 

 

Take the startling moment when Lucie tries out her brand new piano after telling her dad that she’s going to audition for the Paris Conservatory: she plays the first movement of Hungarian master György Ligeti’s fiendishly difficult piano work, Musica ricercata, the second movement of which has become infamous as the unnerving, piano-pounding musical theme of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. 

 

Amalric’s consummate artistry also shows in a key moment late in the film, as he finally uncovers the reason for Clarisse’s loneliness and separation from her family, scoring it to the final movement of Olivier Messiaen’s exquisite Quartet for the End of Time, which was written by its religious composer as a graceful ascent to the Divine. 

 

This moment of rare delicacy underlines Hold Me Tight as a remarkable, singular character study of a woman trapped between the life that she once had and the life that she doesn’t want.