Gabrielle opens with a man, Jean (Pascal Greggory), walking assuredly towards the camera amongst a crowd of men, and confidently narrating about his successful life and docile wife; the film ends with Jean walking silently away, alone, back to the camera, with nothing to say at all. What has passed between the two sequences are a taut 36-hours in which Jean finds out that his wife Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert) does not love him. Or, to be more precise, that neither Jean nor Gabrielle love one another. Adapted from a Joseph Conrad novella by director Patrice Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic, the film focuses on the rupture in Jean’s sedate, comfortable bourgeois life when he finds a note on his dresser from his wife declaring that she has left him, and then, remarkably, hours later, she returns home. Told in the style of a chamber drama but inconsistently energized by title cards yelling dialog Jean fails to say and utilizing engaging slips between black and white photography in the husband’s moments of self-absorption and color for his real life, this intimate but completely superfluous film essentially stages the crumbling of Jean’s scoff-worthy assumption that the passionless, reserved, platonic relationship that has existed for ten years between him and his wife ever had anything to do with love.

Do we really need another film about the layers of self-deception amongst the late-19th, early-20th century bourgeois existing in their social codes and rules? Sure, if one does something new or interesting with the old material, but Chéreau rarely reaches for anything past mere intimate physical inquiry. Casting Greggory, who excels so well at this particular type of social complacency of the period, is perhaps miscast with type, for one sees in him nothing but the regular reactions of shock (when he finds the letter and his world collapses around him), denial (when he tells Gabrielle that they should forget what has transpired between their breakfast and their dinner), and a final realization culminating in the collapse of his assumed self-identity. This progression takes place entirely within the Hervey family house, and there are a number of moments of startling directorial deftness, especially in early scenes involving the servants when Chéreau first gives us glances of them hearing the marital fights and carrying on their services as usual, and a remarkable scene later onwhen the couple shockingly fights behind open doors during a dinner with their social circle. But when Chéreau later slots the life of Gabrielle’s maid (Claudia Coli) into the predictable place as the ready-ear for Madame’s laments, and when the dinner party ends without any real comment or impression of the couple’s fight (typical: the friends are too dignified to register “notice” of the discord), one can see the filmmaking sticking close to the source material and rendering Gabrielle as shocking and inquisitive only for the people for whom Conrad wrote this story over one hundred years ago.

Here and there, of course, Chéreau allows the material to flare-up, though sadly these moments are rarely focused on Huppert or her character, who is given the title of the film but whose problems are mostly interiorized. All too infrequently these jolting, artful infusions are stylistic (as in the title cards, and the later abandoned used of black and white photography), but they do culminate in a luminous sequence, one where for once no one is talking, when the servants shut the Hervey house down for the night, going through the hallways and turning off electric lights, lighting their way with a glowing oil lamp, and Jean is left alone in the house’s quickly dimming inner courtyard amongst his various collected female statuettes. Earlier he mentioned Gabrielle as the finest item in his collection, and this silently staged, visually evocative sequences of dying light aches with an atmospheric melancholy mostly avoided by the film’s many claustrophobic conversations. But perhaps the most incisive and invigorating remark in this dully antiquated drama is a rare moment of self-inquiry from Gabrielle (who, after all the film is named after), who tells her husband that loving the man she was going to run off with was “too demanding” and that if she truly loved Jean she could not have been able to return; she is only able to come back, face him, and live life as normal because their lack of love makes such interactions easier. These are stunning spoken admissions, and ones far more candid and insightful than any of Jean’s bumbling attempts to explain or repair the clarity of his marriage’s loveless basis. If only marital sparring of such vigor and heartbreaking frankness as suggested in this scene were in more of the film’s many intense dialogs (which almost always amount to one character talking to another but really talking about themselves), or if Chéreau’s spirited formal play, so ready to pounce on Conrad’s aged material and add a fresh life to the admittedly fascinating conundrum of “the return,” was more continuous and less reliant on his actors’ solid but predictable embodiment of the usual, Gabrielle really could have been something.