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Director Patrice Leconte's new film is a literary tragedy, based on true events. Lawmakers in the French settlement of St. Pierre, Newfoundland, are eager to acquire a guillotine (a device nicknamed "the widow") to legally behead convicted killer Neel Auguste (Emir Kusturica). The broad-shouldered, wild-haired sailor has in a drunken stupor killed a man who threatened him with a knife. It was, debatably, an unpremeditated and unthinking act, although Auguste's taunting provoked the scuffle. Before a court, he brokenly admits to his crime, although he can hardly remember the specifics. He is nevertheless condemned to death.

The army captain (the magnificent Daniel Auteuil), who acts as a sort of town sheriff, locks up the dejected criminal in a cell at his home. Madame La, the captain's spirited wife (played by the radiant Juliette Binoche), decides to teach Auguste something about responsibility and goodness. She allows him to work on their home and begins teaching him to read. Slowly, neighbors grow curious. Maybe Auguste isn't a hardened killer. Maybe they rashly judged him for what was really a terrible moment of immaturity. At the Hollywood Jesus Web site, the film's central issue is clearly summed up. "This film helps us to question the appropriateness of capital punishment. Do people change? Neel Auguste certainly did. Do we do anything, as Madame La did, to bring change into their lives or do we simply seek to punish them and treat them cruelly?"

The community's doubts are turned to admiration when Auguste bravely saves an imperiled neighbor from certain death. Madame La is overjoyed. But the local lawmakers are incensed, sensing a threat to their authority. They don't want to face Auguste's humanity; they want to look on him as a dangerous beast.

The film does not, in my opinion, adequately explore the seriousness and repercussions of Auguste's crime, however unpremeditated or foolish. And perhaps the rehabilitation of the brute is a bit romanticized—Auguste happily goes about repairing roofs, gardening, and studying. Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum believes that the movie favors Auguste's conscientious redeemers too clearly, but he isn't bothered by that: "It is true that the movie stacks the deck in Auguste's favor and displays no curiosity about the murder victim—a form of indirect dramatic expediency. Yet if one believes, as I do, that capital punishment is both barbaric and ineffectual as a deterrent against crime, then the deck stacking is no more objectionable than the casting of big stars to play the sexy leads." David Denby at The New Yorker is not as generous, saying the film, "for all its stern moral conviction, manages to duck the only question worth asking: would a less sympathetic murderer be worth saving from the blade?"

Another moral dilemma presents itself when Auguste and Madame La discover the first inklings of an attraction to each other. With her husband so often "gone on business," perhaps it is loneliness, perhaps memories, that kindles the tension between her and this sometimes gentle giant. When Auguste, who still has a lot of growing up to do, impregnates a willing and eager local woman, he then tries to rectify the situation by marrying her. Madame La looks on with mixed feelings. This chapter got Roger Ebert's attention. "It's not that she wants to be [Auguste's] lover; in the 1850s such a thought would probably not occur," the Chicago Sun-Times critic writes. "It's that she is happy for him, and is marrying him and having his child vicariously. And Le Captaine knows that, and loves her the more for it." Le Captaine is concerned about the intense platonic relationship between his wife and a strange man, but he trusts and understands her. Unspoken glances between husband and wife suggest that perhaps Le Captaine himself was once untamed and undisciplined. His trust is well-placed; Madame La resists temptation and runs into her husband's arms with a renewed appreciation for his love.

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45