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- 2022
- Kino Lorber
- 1 h 37 m
- 2022
- Kino Lorber
- 1 h 37 m
Summary In the family drama Hold Me Tight, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Bergman Island) plays Camille (Vicky Krieps) is a woman on the run from her family for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. The film alternates between Camille’s adventures on the road and scenes of her abandoned husband Marc (Arieh Worthalter) as he struggles to take car...
Directed By: Mathieu Amalric
Written By: Claudine Galea, Mathieu Amalric
- 2022
- Kino Lorber
- 1 h 37 m
- 2022
- Kino Lorber
- 1 h 37 m
Hold Me Tight
82
6.4
Where to Watch
Summary In the family drama Hold Me Tight, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Bergman Island) plays Camille (Vicky Krieps) is a woman on the run from her family for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. The film alternates between Camille’s adventures on the road and scenes of her abandoned husband Marc (Arieh Worthalter) as he struggles to take car...
Directed By: Mathieu Amalric
Written By: Claudine Galea, Mathieu Amalric
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 13 Critic Reviews
82
92% Positive
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
8% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 13 Critic Reviews
82
92% Positive
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
8% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Narratively, the film’s last two thirds feel somewhat scattered, or perhaps “shattered” is a better word to reflect the catastrophe at the center of the story. The key to holding these fragments together, and avoiding making the movie’s grim turn unbearable, is the deeply fascinating performance of Vicky Krieps as Clarisse.
I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 9 User Ratings
6.4
33% Positive
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
56% Mixed
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
11% Negative
1 Rating
1 Rating
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 9 User Ratings
6.4
33% Positive
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
56% Mixed
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
11% Negative
1 Rating
1 Rating
'Hold Me Tight' is like a puzzle that's very satisfying to solve. At first, the plot seems to be about a mother abandoning her family, but the revelation in the third act gives a whole new meaning to what we just saw. Vicky Krieps gives another fine performance as a broken woman in search of solace. It is not until the final moments that we finally get what's going on with her. This a tale about grief and how this feeling tears us apart — the reconciliation with life and the what-ifs. Mathieu Amalric delivers a challenging exercise — through a collection of flashbacks, multiple timelines, and fantasies — to everyone willing to feel instead of trying to understand.
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When viewing a film that’s presented as a puzzle, one certainly hopes that everything will make sense at the end. Of course, if that result is to be at all satisfactory, the narrative for getting viewers to that conclusion needs to be equally engaging. Unfortunately, that’s where writer-director Mathieu Amalric’s latest offering loses its way. While the story of a wife and mother (Vicky Krieps) desperate to leave her family starts out strong (especially since her reasons for doing so are far from clear), audiences are likely to think that they’re in store for a compelling ride, a mystery that’s going to deliciously reveal itself as the story plays out. However, after this noteworthy beginning, the picture spins its yarn in a highly fractured way, mixing a variety of images that appear to draw from current activity, flashbacks and envisioned futures (some even of a fantasy nature), all thrown together in a somewhat haphazard fashion that constitutes more muddle than riddle. One can readily assume that this jumble of imagery is indicative of what’s going on in the protagonist’s mind, but that’s not always clear nor is the cause for it. Thankfully, the filmmaker manages to tie up all of the various strands by picture’s end, but it asks viewers to go back and reassemble the pieces that lead its conclusion, and, frankly, that seems like an awful lot of work to go through after a protracted stretch of film where it’s easy for audience members to lose interest. To its credit, this release provides an excellent showcase for Krieps, backed by gorgeous cinematography and a superb classical music score, as well as its fine opening sequence. But these strengths aren’t enough to compensate for the shortcomings and an overall approach that often seems contrived and certainly sacrifices substance for style. This is the kind of picture that will definitely appeal to the arthouse crowd, but average moviegoers are likely to find it pretentious, self-important and needlessly cryptic, qualities that detract from what could have been more involving had the filmmakers kept matters simpler and less enigmatic.
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Watching large chunks of this film feels like being transported into a trance-like reverie, albeit a reverie that quite often has nightmarish contours.
It’s a powerful piece of work with poetic direction and incredible work from Krieps, an actress who increasingly feels like she’s never going to miss.
Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems. That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.
Krieps makes her journey into this open wound not just intriguing, but heartbreaking.
For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.
Daqueles filmes que vai a lugar nenhum, ao menos é possível aqui discutir o papel da mulher dentro de uma família, e com passos sensíveis daquele tipo de cinema que está no cotidiano. Mas há milhares de exemplares que trabalham melhor o tema.
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(Mauro Lanari)
In the pendular motion of History, today's phase is that of a very violent reactive oscillation against the previous mass phenomenon of existentialism. Today we are content to tell Eros and Thanatos with fragmentariness, streams of consciousness, increasingly elaborate stylistic strategies, in order to omit any deepening of the content: banished as a deadly temptation the question of meaning, the "Seinsfrage", culture deliberately goes around in circles. Amalric already testified to this with his roles as an actor and now also as a director.
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Production Company
Les Films du Poisson,
Gaumont,
Arte France Cinéma,
Lupa Film,
Canal+,
Ciné+,
Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR),
ARTE,
Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC),
Région Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée,
Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine,
Département de la Charente-Maritime,
Indéfilms 8,
Cinémage 14
Release Date Sep 9, 2022
Duration 1 h 37 m
Genres
Website
https://moviola.jp/kanojo/
Awards
César Awards, France
• 2 Nominations
Magritte Awards, Belgium
• 1 Nomination
Días de Cine Awards
• 1 Nomination
