Mark Reviews Movies: HOLD ME TIGHT (2022)

Hold Me Tight, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

Writer/director Mathieu Amalric's Hold Me Tight begins as the story of a woman—a wife and mother of two—on the run from her family. It technically remains that story, but the rationale for the departure of Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) from her home to live a new life on her own gradually reveals itself here in a haunting and inescapable way. Amalric, adapting Claudine Galea's play, puts us inside the mindset of this character in ways that we think we know and in other ways that we don't fully understand until much later.

The filmmaker's primary approach to this is through seemingly straightforward editing. At first, we meet Clarisse, who is leaving her house in the early hours of the morning. She dresses, packs some things, and takes last looks at her husband Marc (Arieh Worthalter) and two children—younger son Paul (Sacha Ardilly), who is sound asleep, and slightly older daughter Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet), whose eyes meet her mother's before she leaves the kids' shared bedroom. Clarisse leaves out the kitchen door and takes off the sheet covering Marc's classic car.

As all of this happens, Amalric intercuts the steps of Clarisse's departure with a scene of the rest of the family later that morning. The kids get ready for school as Marc prepares breakfast for them, and as we watch these two scenes play out together, details start to match, such as how Marc discovers that the kitchen door is unlocked, since Clarisse didn't lock it from the outside, and how a shopping list sits on the table, since we soon learn that Clarisse lingered over the paper with a pen and some thoughts that she ultimately didn't write.

Her disappearance, then, is a mystery, both to us at first, because Clarisse is vague about her reasons for leaving her family (A friend who works at a gas station on the way out of town is happy for her, but that doesn't say much, except that Clarisse has been thinking about it for some time and had to have been miserable about something), and to the family members for as long their purpose in this remains the way we assume it to be. Some vagueness is required here. While Amalric doesn't necessarily hide the reality of this story for long, so much of the film's impact is in discovering what has happened to this family and when it happened, what's actually happening with Clarisse and how it fully overwhelms her life, and why the entire story seems to exist in a kind of emotional and, at times, physical limbo.

The initial mood is of regret, of course, because Clarisse is torn between leaving, because she knows how much she's missing of her family's lives, and staying, because she admits that there were times of utter frustration with her kids—who bugged her, to be sure—and Marc—whom she describes as "furniture" to someone in the bar she frequents in her new location. Life goes on for Clarisse, as she takes a job giving tours of an old ship somewhere in Spain. She's waiting for something, too.

Somehow, life also continues for Marc, who keeps talking about his wife as the months and then the years go by until he considers getting back on the dating market, and the kids. Lucie becomes a teenager (played by Juliette Benveniste), working toward becoming a professional pianist (Clarisse has recordings of her daughter playing and, inexplicably, improving in real time on the tape), and Paul grows up, too, into an imaginative but slightly antagonistic adolescent (played by Aurèle Grzesik). There are moments in which Clarisse seem to have an almost preternatural ability to predict what will happen in those scenes of her family back home, and while we first imagine it has something to do with how predictable her life had become and how well she knows Marc, there is something else, obviously, going on in this story.

Back and forth goes Amalric's narrative, and the director, along with editor François Gédigier, quickly establish a pattern that lulls us into both a feeling of routine and a sense of the meaning of this split tale. In a way, that is the routine, in terms of both the rhythm of the storytelling and how these separate lives find some kind of normalcy.

The key scene that explains what's actually happening, though, arrives earlier than one might expect here, and its importance is only noticeable because of the foundation of that pattern and the way Amalric shatters it with a scene that exists outside of the space, time, and relationships as they've been established. The rest of the story remains about regret, but it's much deeper than simply missing out on what is happening elsewhere to people Clarisse loves and misses.

If Amalric's ever-shifting storytelling—in terms of timelines and meaning—is impressive in how cohesive it is in its brokenness, Krieps' performance is the glue that holds its emotional core together. Her performance is tricky in that it must suggest so much, as well as so much that's consistent across the constantly changing context of what Clarisse has experienced, is experiencing, and know she must confront once that awaited change does arrive. It's a reserved, internalized performance, building toward a devastating moment of catharsis (which is slightly undone by Amalric's decision to end the entire film with a clichéd and unconvincing smile).

Hold Me Tight lives with and inside this character in unexpected ways. In the process, the film uncovers layers of regret, resentment, and grief.

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