Philippe Claudel's Il y a longtemps que je t'aime | I've loved you for so long (2008)

Philippe Claudel's first-directed film Il y a longtemps que je t'aime is translated literally as I've loved you for so long, but what's lost in translation is the fact that this is the first line of the chorus of a very well known nursery song. What else can I say about the film? That it's about a woman, medical doctor Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas), who's just been released from prison after a fifteen-year sentence, although we don't know why. Her sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) knows why, and she warmly greets Juliette into the home she shares with two adopted Asian children, her dumb father-in-law and her husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), who also knows why, and is initially cold to Juliette.

We come to learn what Juliette's crime is when she tells a potential employer that she murdered her six-year-old son. The man's reaction is to tell her to 'piss off', which is a reaction that was perhaps to be expected. The big question, of course, is why she killed her son, which certainly neither Léa nor Luc know, although Léa continues to encourage her coming back to life, and Luc very much warms to her as she loses her frosty exterior.

She finds a job as a secretary in a hospital, although her boss gently asks her to be a little less distanced from her work colleagues, although of course he understands. She calmly (but obviously in anger) asks him what exactly does he understand. And there we have the central problem: what, for that matter, does the viewer understand after he or she knows the truth?

Juliette's son Pierre had a fatal illness and she realised that he was increasingly in greater pain as the illness progressed: she felt compelled to end his misery, and so gave him a lethal injection: in other words she did the one thing a loving mother could only do under the circumstances. And she said nothing in court, nothing in her defence. Let's be honest: for this act of compassion, for this act of – yes, for this act of love – she tortures herself in prison for fifteen years, she is stripped of her doctoral qualifications, she causes tremendous anguish to her sister and her mother (now stricken by Alzheimer's), for what exactly? So Juliette can play at martyrdom, and in so doing hurt even more people?

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime is finely acted, it has some very moving moments, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to have felt mindlessly cheated by this melodramatic tear-jerker, this hopelessly unbelievable film which collapses so bizarrely in on itself. Charity shop fodder.