2015 Cannes Critics’ Panel Day 10: Takes Two to Limbo in Nicloux’s “Valley Of Love”

A Croisette anomaly of sorts and still a relative unknown despite his three decade and dozen film span, Guillaume Nicloux’s only previous Cannes showing was 1994’s Faut pas rire du bonheur landing in the Directors’ Fortnight. An American based West Coast meeting place grief-stricken drama, this also happens to be Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu’s on-screen reunion a good 35 years after Maurice Pialat’s “Loulou”. Working with Huppert once again after 2013’s The Nun, Valley of Love actually follows last year’s The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. While our panel gave the film your average passing grade of three, our Nicholas Bell appears to have been the among the few touched by the awkwardness of the affair stating that the film is “a rather beautiful, melancholy poem about guilt, grief, and the tragedy of expectation.”