Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Crwthod A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Byron Dandy It's really interesting to read all the gushing reviews of the film on this board. Interesting in that my experience watching this film last week at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) was completely the opposite. I haven't read the Joseph Conrad original so perhaps I needed to do so, to better appreciate the story.Of the 18 films I've seen at the festival so far, I found this film to be the least personally engaging and most frustrating. Uninvolving story and unlikable lead characters coupled with a tedious pace completely annoyed me. A passionless marriage and the consequences of a single action were also clearly not enough to keep many from walking out of my session. My feeling was that the film would never have been included in the festival if not for the clout of Huppert and the fact that it was French. I found her performance irritating and lifeless - perhaps that was the point and I didn't appreciate it enough. I felt occasional moments of 'Last Year At Marienbad' when watching except that I really enjoyed that film unlike this one. If this had been an Australian made film, the knives would surely have been out, for "wasting tax payers money" etc in the press. Interesting to note in the now completed 2006 Sydney Film Festival that it ranked 25th with the audience vote in a field of 25 world cinema features screened. So clearly others have shared my pain.

Mike O This is a wonderfully acted dramatization of 19th Century English society, with 'invisible' servants in excess, stereotyped poses and inhibitions built around social mores of what should have been an unbelievable epoch. However, the 21st Century music, cinematic tricks (black and white to color switches) and pretentiousness of the direction distract the viewer from what should have been provocative and gripping themes. Understanding the emotional impacts of the customs, social strata and expectations during this era should have been fascinating, but somehow becomes boring in this film. One tires of seeing the four servants in the kitchen washing, drying or watching the handling of a single dish, or the two or more servants who appear for almost any activity, or even the regularly attended Thursday dinner parties suggest that privacy is an alien concept to that milieu.

Biff Tread Don't get me wrong, I'm as much of a film snob as anyone out there...but if you want to see a French film in which two characters spend the entire time arguing about a relationship, I strongly recommend skipping this tedious and basically shallow flick and watching instead Hiroshima Mon Amour or Last Year at Marienbad (both directed by Alain Resnais).Gabrielle is a strange film...the loud, tense music, the effects of lighting, the experimental flashing of words on the screen...all are wasted, in my opinion, on the more or less trite and endlessly circular argument the two characters carry out throughout the film. The music, especially, often seems to bear no relationship at all or an extremely overblown one to the scene it is involved with.A lot of the reviews you will read here say you should think of this film as more of an opera or a play...but this is a FILM...and the story needs to be suited to that medium. It ISN'T!!!

Harry T. Yung This second most recent Isabelle Huppert film (according to the IMDb listing) is one of the dozen plus selections in the "A tribute to Isabelle Huppert" program in the "Le French May" festival in town, and was also featured in the "Gala presentation" segment (in such company as "Paradise now", "Goodnight, and good luck", "Match point") in the Hong Kong International Film Festival a month before.Art-house to the core, "Gabrielle" reminds you first of Ibsen's "A dolls house", except that Gabrielle returns almost right away. By sheer coincidence, I watched also recently a rarely performed one-act play by Harold Pinter – "Ashes to ashes" – and detect some similarities, the trying relationship in a married couple explored in a continuous, theatrical dialogue. It was also an interesting experience watching "A judgment in stone" and "Gabrielle" back to back, in that order, with 18 minutes in between, comparing a very uncharacteristic and a very characteristic Huppert close up.I suspect, no, I'm absolutely certain, that what I got out of "Gabrielle" was greatly discounted by not understanding French. The subtitle (English only) makes sense in most cases, but at times makes clearly discernible suggestions that there are just subtle things that don't lend themselves to meaningful translations.