Life is full of mystery, and there are certain things we can never truly understand: are we alone in the universe? What is the meaning of life? Is there a higher power? These are the questions that keep me up at night, or least they used to up until yesterday. These existential quandaries have now been replaced by one question that continues to bother me: what was Benoît Jacquot thinking with Villa Amalia? I simply cannot remember the last time I experienced a film this frustratingly awful, one with so much potential, but not even an iota of insight into determining how the film should execute its numerous ideas. In the most simple terms, this is one of the most disappointing films I have seen over the course of the past few months, and something that would be so easy to dismiss by saying “it could have been better” – this would assume there was actually some merit embedded within it that makes it somewhat worthwhile – unfortunately, Villa Amalia shouldn’t need to have worried about being better, but rather concerned itself with being a coherent film overall. There has rarely been a film with so much talent behind it, a story tailor-made for a masterpiece and the ability to be something special, that squandered absolutely all of it in its endeavour to be profound and moving when in actuality, the only movement inspired by this film is towards utter boredom.

Apparently, Villa Amalia tells the story of Eliane (Isabelle Huppert), a pianist who has changed her name to Ann Hidden (a moment of definite subtle foreshadowing if there ever was one) and is on the verge of some sort of breakdown, especially after discovering that her husband is having an affair. Like any ordinary, functional human being, Ann decides that instead of either working through the emotions and coming to terms with the breakdown of her marriage or at least getting the psychological help that will allow her to rebuild her life and once again earn a sense of self-worth, she decides to disappear. Cutting off communication with absolutely everyone (except for an old flame who just so happens to be in the right place at the right time), she ventures off into Italy, where she finds a mountaintop villa, which she forcibly rents from a bitter Italian widow who voices her own disdain at the plight of her very pushy visitor. Ann finds herself falling in love, and whether it be with her old love, a new woman who she encounters when she is drowning in the sea after getting a cramp (modern romance!), with Italy as a whole or the barren villa in which she apparently finds her salvation, Ann is in search of some deeper meaning and understanding of the world around her, which she is failing to come to terms with in the midst of a midlife change.

Villa Amalia represents a turning point for me as a film-lover and writer – normally, I am used to being overwhelmed by the numerous merits of a great film or being disappointed by the few but significant shortcomings of a film that did not meet my expectations. To date, I have never been quite as overwhelmed by the mediocrity of a film to the point where it not only becomes a tragedy but something so awful, it should be admired more than it is despised. Villa Amalia is an excruciatingly bad film, and one that doesn’t only disappoint massively in a few ways, but in each and every way. I refuse to believe that Jacquot was trying to make a good film here, or even just a film overall. Its impossible to even find a place to start talking about precisely where this film fails, because the film itself does a good enough job of portraying exactly why it is a putrid, dismal muddle of misguided attempts at profundity, and an existential core that undoubtedly has history’s great philosopher’s spinning in their graves with feverish intensity. Villa Amalia is such a bad film, it even exceeds the limits of what I previously thought bad cinema was – this is not “so bad, its good” – this is so relentlessly awful and lurid, it actually becomes an active experience, where the audience watches in great anticipation to see which element of this supposedly transcendent existential drama Jacquot will fumble with next. Villa Amalia is a film that did not necessarily have to be great – these kinds of stories are essentially a dime a dozen. But it did need to have some semblance of artistic merit behind it in some minuscule way, and considering the pedigree of those involved, one could have been so easily fooled into thinking this was anything more than a rambling disaster.

We can try and find merits in this film, but that’s almost a hopeless endeavour because Villa Amalia is a masterclass in how to do the opposite when making a great film. Breaking it down into a variety of key components, we can see how absolutely everything Jacquot does with this film doesn’t work in some way. In terms of the story, there isn’t a great deal that happens throughout the course of the film – in fact, this appears to just be an attempt to make a supposedly profound film without actually putting in much effort. Understandably, Villa Amalia is not an original film, but one based off a novel – in this regard, we shouldn’t deride the film itself for lacking a story, but rather the fact that it took a beautifully-written novel that is constructed in the style of the main character’s frantic and disparate thoughts and her journey to self-realization, and tries to translate it directly to the screen. Anyone who has ever seen the mangled attempts at bringing the likes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf to the visual medium will know how precisely difficult this is: Modernist just doesn’t work well when directly adapted, because so much depends on the evocative imagery and poetry of the printed word, which is entirely absent in Villa Amalia, which has taken something that was constructed out of a variety of intricate, meditative moments, and turned it into a dull and pointless experience that not only doesn’t live up to its potential, but sacrifices it through a complete lack of effort. Jacquot seems to forget that a filmmaker has poetic licence, and while the original novel is effective in its original form, a direct attempt to bring it to the screen, perhaps solely in the story, but also in the style, just makes for something extremely underwhelming.

Another issue with Villa Amalia is that it finds itself struggling to determine exactly what it wants to be. Its very common for films that are normally designed to be dramas in terms of the subject matter to be repurposed and realized as comedy (one of the key elements of satire), but very rarely do we see the inverse, where something was constructed to be an exuberant, entertaining and heartfelt comedy is instead stripped of every bit of charm it didn’t even know it had, and condensed into an uncomfortable, ill-formed melodrama that takes itself way too seriously – there were moments in Villa Amalia that seemed like Jacquot was trying to make a thriller, which would not have been nearly as bad the final result. It isn’t to say that the tone in this film is inconsistent – for what its worth, one merit of Villa Amalia is that it keeps everything quite regular. The problem is that this is not good enough, and becomes a bit of a chore to get through, because once we realize this film is not going to reach the apex we think it will (nor does it reach any conceivably decent climax), there is no way to regain the trust of the audience. It toddles along at an uncomfortable pace, lingering too long on inconsequential scenes and moments that just don’t make much sense, with or without context. Of all the poor choices, I definitely think the decision to prevent any warmth to pervade this film in any way was amongst the worst, because we can forgive poor performances or a lack of a story, but the disregard for the plot that Jacquot demonstrates here is inexcusable, and considering he has shown himself capable of making a decent film, both before and after this, just proves how little effort actually went into Villa Amalia.

It is not a secret that I revere Isabelle Huppert – she is most definitely in the pantheon of great screen presences, and I definitely subscribe to the belief that she is one of the greatest actresses in the world. In fact, that does everything so well and her perfectionism as a performer resonates with every role she takes on, to the point where she is even good at giving a mediocre performance. Villa Amalia confirms something I am sure many of us suspected but didn’t want to admit – when it comes to sleepwalking through a performance, no one does it quite like Huppert. She has shown herself capable of such remarkable performances, and she has hit so many highs so consistently, she has earned her place in film history. The problem is that when she hits a low, she does so with the same speed and intensity, and while this sometimes improves a bad film, in the case of Villa Amalia, her lifeless performance is one of the biggest problems. This is a character that Huppert plays with a blend of disregard and inertia – she does absolutely nothing with her role and seems to be putting in as little effort as possible. I’m not sure if this is a consequence of a bad script, a director who does not understand how to utilize Huppert (unlikely, since Jacquot has worked with Huppert on many occasions and brought out some of her best work) or the actress herself is never clear. A few sporadic sentences and the occasional moments of quasi-emotions show that Huppert often oscillates between utter brilliance and sheer laziness, with Villa Amalia being the definitive example of the latter. You can’t blame her – this film looks promising on paper (and it serves to be an early forerunner for her incredible performances in films like Things to Come and Valley of Love, which manage to convey the story of a woman undergoing an existential crisis far better). The fact is that when you have one of the greatest actresses of her generation, and all you can give her to do is walk in a variety of directions, you certainly can’t expect to be making something particularly good.

In looking back at it, I can’t recall a single moment in Villa Amalia that I actually enjoyed. In fact, I can’t remember much about this film overall, and nearly nothing lingers afterwards. The film is poorly directed – I think less than a dozen scenes in this film are longer than a minute (it often feels like a ninety-minute long trailer for a better movie), and to manage to make something that lacks a story even more of a bore is a feat to be admired. Not even the presence of Huppert, who is at her most vulnerable, can compensate for the disregard this film has for its story, for its audience and the entire medium as a whole. This is the embodiment of all the worst qualities of the European arthouse – the pretentious story, the banality masquerading as profound insights, and the distant locations (which I will concede are undeniably beautiful, perhaps the only genuinely good part of this film as a whole) that serve as the stage for a complex protagonist’s journey to self-actualisation. Villa Amalia is not as smart as it thinks it is, not as interesting as it wants to be, and not as resonant as it should be. It lacks warmth and intelligence, and often just fails to make any two coherent points meet to just create something to keep the audience captivated. Villa Amalia is a film that had a lot that it could’ve been based on its background, the people making it and the legacy of great films with similar concepts. The fact that it not only failed to live up to any of its potential but also proved to be a prime example of pure artistic incompetence is a bitter disappointment, and the precise reason why there is no need to go looking for any merits to try and salvage this film, because it should have known better than to be the dreadful catastrophe that it ended up becoming.