Each letter she receives from them is full of complaints she’s not ready to face yet. In reality, Clarisse used it as an excuse to leave and do as she pleased. Though Clarisse’s parents did love her dearly, their strictness and dedication to the family’s goal was a point of contention between them and their daughter.Ĭlarisse then embarked on the journey her parents entrusted her with the capturing of their ancestor, Cagliostro. Despite that, Clarisse had trouble with basic forms of alchemy on top of having incredible difficulty studying. Their line specializes in alchemic decomposition, a mastery that Clarisse outshines even her family head in. So does a peculiar sense of satisfaction with her own creative invention, her ability to take the stuff of unspeakable tragedy and fashion it into something like art.Clarisse is the direct descendant of the founder of Alchemy’s younger sister, and is the daughter of Promethia and Harold. Clarisse is saddened and haunted by her loss, but she is also driven - and, you sense, surprised and gratified - by less predictable impulses.Īmusement, exasperation and even joy have a way of stealing into her face at unexpected moments. Krieps has a gift for suggesting complicated, subterranean emotions (“Phantom Thread,” “Bergman Island”), and she and Amalric both resist the impulse to turn a story of grief and separation into a dirge. For Clarisse, music keeps her bond with her daughter alive, even as it pushes her, in one emotionally harrowing episode, past the point of obsession. If we can’t always believe the evidence of our eyes, “Hold Me Tight” suggests we can at least trust our ears. Lucie, a gifted pianist, has now become a full-blown virtuoso, and her skilled performances of Beethoven, Debussy and Ligeti provide crucial connective tissue. The passage of time is measured in ways both serious and playful: in the painting of a newly renovated kitchen, in the fresh ink on Marc’s tattooed chest and above all in the faces of the actors who play the older versions of Lucie (Juliette Benveniste) and Paul (Aurèle Grzesik). There’s a moment here when Clarisse wipes a layer of snow off her car and peers through the window, a look of utter desolation on her face, that cuts to the heart of her struggle more vividly than any conventionally scripted scene could. 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. How do you unpack a family’s upheaval while steering clear of the obvious? How do you describe a character’s emotional journey without lapsing into exposition?Īmalric finds a way. What’s happened to her and her family is no great mystery - it’s revealed less than a third of the way through - but I’m reluctant to disclose it here, partly because the challenge of writing about this story is not entirely dissimilar to the challenge that Amalric has set himself in telling it. Something terrible has happened, and it explains both the necessity of Clarisse’s sudden departure and the feelings of bitterness and despair that frequently seize hold of her, whether she’s staring out at the horizon, drowning her sorrows or lashing out at a stranger. Really, though, the hole is already there. Your uncertainty may persist when, sometime later, Marc and the kids awaken and get started on their day, perplexed though not shattered (yet) to find their wife and mom missing. But Amalric, a superb actor-turned-reliably-fine filmmaker (“On Tour,” “The Blue Room”), has a deft touch with surprises.Īnd so when you first see Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) slip out of her house on a cold morning - stealing one last glance at the sleeping figures of her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), and their children, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet) and Paul (Sacha Ardilly), before driving off in a vintage AMC Pacer - the full significance of what she’s doing may not be fully apparent. That might seem like an odd thing to say about a picture that deals in acutely painful emotions, venturing into dramatic terrain that some viewers may be content to visit once if at all. “Let’s start again.” The opening line of “Hold Me Tight” hits a little differently the second time around - and the movie, a jagged little heartbreaker from French writer-director Mathieu Amalric, is certainly built for repeat viewings.
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