After the commercial failure of her last film, the wonderfully gloomy Saturn Bowling (2022), Patricia Mazuy has attempted something she has never done before: to make a popular film. Here, it is worth pointing out that the French title of Visiting Hours is La Prisonnière de Bordeaux, an evident nod to the French title of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), which is La Prisonnière du désert. Mazuy probably dreams of directing a foul, violent western in the vein of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Which, is why she usually directs films that are not westerns but still stories about brothers who fight each other (1989’s Thick Skinned, Saturn Bowling), killers chased by cops across the countryside (Paul Sanchez Is Back!, 2018), and people riding horses, but only for sport (Of Women and Horses, 2012).
And so, it is admittedly strange to see Mazuy try her hand at a more popular form, with famous actresses and a narrative that is less twisted and uncomfortable than her usual ones. Visiting Hours is the furthest she’s ever been from the western genre. It is a film about two women, which is unusual because she has become increasingly interested in creepy masculine figures, or at least the representation of oppositional forces between men and women, over the course of her career. Here, perhaps as the result of her collaboration with the French novelist and essayist François Bégaudeau (their first collaboration, since Mazuy wrote most of her previous films with screenwriters Simon Reggianni and Yves Thomas), or perhaps because she is attempting to stage a more modern narrative, the men in her film are almost peripheral. Trying to find the balance between a mainstream criminal drama and auteur filmmaking, she turns to the most notable example of a French filmmaker who managed to mix both: Claude Chabrol, as Visiting Hours can be seen as a retelling of La Cérémonie (1995), with Huppert starring in both films.
But more than that, Visiting Hours is Chabrolian in its shady portrayal of the vanity, greed, and cruelty of the bourgeoisie. Nothing shows this better than the reception scene near the end, when Huppert gathers her friends for a glass of champagne to thank her lawyer for the early release of her husband from jail. When Hafsia Herzi, who plays a young woman that Huppert takes care of because their husbands are in the same prison, enters the scene with her two children, the bourgeois gathering proceeds to stare at them and comment on their looks. One of them quotes Gérard de Nerval, “the first orientalist.” Herzi answers: “The wine is good. Expensive and good, just like a good lawyer.” Her answer is blunt, like Mazuy’s staging of the scene, a simple opposition between two sides of the room and two cinematic spaces, of class relations and of post-colonial ways. Rumor has it Mazuy is now planning a film about the Algerian Liberation War.
Visiting Hours screens tonight, March 10, at Film at Lincoln Center as part of “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.”
