Philly FF Review: Cages

A darkly amusing, strangely insightful and very well-acted French romance drama, Olivier Masset-Depasse's Cages is about how far one person will go to hang on to a passionate love affair that, for a variety of unimpeachable reasons, has simply run its course. It's a movie about that panicky feeling you get when you know the romance has died and, as such, Cages is almost too personal and painful to truly "enjoy" in the traditional sense, but Masset-Depasse keeps the story moving along briskly -- even if his third act destinations seems ported in from a weirder and less interesting film.

Anne Coesens plays Eve, a paramedic who's madly in love with her bar-owner husband Damien, but when a horrific ambulance accident leaves Eve with a seriously pronounced stutter, she retreats into herself and becomes a silent and self-pitying shell of her former self. After a year passes and Eve is still struggling to form full words, Damien drops a bombshell: He's worried that Eve is no longer than woman he once fell in love with ... oh, and there's a seriously sexy beer distributor called Lea who just might have caught Damien's eye.

With her personal, professional, psychological and marital life in a state of complete chaos, Eve snaps just a little bit -- and decides to tie Damien down on their bed. Her logic, one assumes, is that Damien will see just how far Eve will go in her devotion to their partnership, but that's not exactly how Damien sees it. But with her husband firmly bound to the bed, Eve finds it pretty difficult to run Damien's neighborhood pub (especially with the big annual "animal impersonations" contest on the way) -- plus Lea has started sniffing around, poking through rooms and wondering where Damien's been hiding.

If Cages sounds like a horror flick or a psychological thriller, it's not. We do get a few mildly creepy insights into Eve's thought processes (fear of being abandoned, replaced, unwanted) but this is by no means a "hell hath no fury" Fatal Attraction-style concoction. It's a straight and generally serious character study about the ways in which we (over-)rely on our partners, how we often allow our own singular identities to morph into a creature called a "couple," and the countless ways in which insecurity and neuroses can attach themselves to even the most even-keeled and contented persons.

The interplay between Coesens and actor Sagamore Stevenin is really quite excellent, which is a good thing considering they're found in pretty much every frame of Cages. (The stunningly beautiful Micheline Goethals, as the opportunistic "other woman" Lea, is also quite memorable.) But once the premise has been set up and worked out, Cages kicks in with a final twenty minutes that feels somewhat incongruous -- and not nearly as interesting as the struggle between Eve and Damien that we've been privy to for about an hour. Suffice to say I never knew that "animal impersonations" were considered a competitive pastime in France -- and the "big contest" brings a sense of broad weirdness that the film simply doesn't need. It's not enough to sink the whole experience, but Cages is at its best when it's a two-person piece.