KARMA Review

There is something irresistible about the premise of Guillaume Canet directing his now-ex-wife Marion Cotillard through a film about a woman who escapes a controlling man and is then forced back into his orbit. We are not here to psychoanalyze the production. We are here to tell you that whatever the personal architecture of this collaboration, it has produced in Cotillard one of the most committed and physically inhabited performances of her recent career, and that the film around it is a lurid, imperfect, genuinely engaging melodrama that earns more than it probably deserves.

Karma opens in coastal Spain with Jeanne, erratic and drinking too much, living with a man who loves her and knows almost nothing about her. There is a boy she is devoted to with an intensity that the film takes its time explaining. There is a secret that the film withholds with more patience than the audience can comfortably sustain. And then the boy goes missing, and Jeanne runs, and she runs toward the one place that is worse than what she left: the cult compound in France where she was raised, governed by a man named Marc whose control over his flock is absolute and whose gentleness is the most frightening thing about him.

Denis Ménochet as Marc is a great bear of a man who hides his rage under the guise of enlightened asceticism. He is one of the more genuinely chilling screen villains we have encountered at this festival.

The cult itself is drawn with the broad strokes of the genre rather than the specificity of lived experience, which is both a strength and a limitation. Canet keeps the religious details vague enough to avoid direct comparison to any one tradition, which gives the film a certain portability but also occasionally a certain weightlessness. The compound's stone walls are formidably atmospheric. The logic of how it functions sometimes does not bear close scrutiny. Children are sent to a nearby public school every day, which strains the film's own premise about Marc's control. There are a few reveals that arrive with the thud of convenience rather than the force of inevitability.

But Canet is a technically confident filmmaker and he keeps the film moving at a lurid potboiler temperature that makes the two and a half hours feel shorter than they are. And whenever the storytelling sags, Cotillard holds it. She is an ever-shifting portrait of a woman simultaneously on the run from her present and her past, keeping us guessing at Jeanne's true motivations even when the script has already decided what they are. There are moments in the compound where she is required to perform submission so total that it becomes its own kind of violence, and she does not flinch from any of it.

Jeanne's subjugation is an extreme version of what many women experience across the planet: controlled, diminished, kept. The soapiest film cannot obscure the relevance of that.

Karma is aware of this and takes it seriously, which elevates it above its more mechanical moments. The points being made about powerful men and the structures they build to sustain their power are not subtle, but they do not need to be. Some films make their arguments in poetry. Karma makes its in plot, and the plot, for all its contrivances, does land where it intends to.

We left the theater with the specific satisfaction of a film that delivered exactly what it promised and slightly more. Not the best thing we have seen at Cannes. Not close. But an engaging, well-performed, politically aware melodrama that earns its runtime through sheer commitment. Cotillard in particular reminds us, as she periodically does, that she is one of the most capable screen performers of her generation and that not enough films are giving her the opportunity to prove it. There is still more of day four to come.

🍿 SCORE = 67/100