Both in its original French (“La Prisonnière de Bordeaux”) and in its English translation (“Visiting Hours”), the title for Patricia Mazuy’s latest offers a bit of misdirection. This is not really a prison drama. Its focus is instead on two women who share little in common but the fact that their husbands are both jailed in the same facility. Their happenstance meeting during an afternoon prison visit gives way to an unlikely dynamic that gets ever thornier the more their two disparate worlds collide. But Mazuy’s chilly melodrama eventually does live up to its title(s). At its core, this tight, terse study in both class and race relations is about the walls we create around one another — and the cost of letting others into prisons of our own making.
The first thing to note about “Visiting Hours” is that the facility where Alma (Isabelle Huppert) first encounters Mina (Hafsia Herzi) is not like any such institution in the U.S. The space may well house convicted felons, but there’s a sense of dignity about it. Dutiful wives and relatives leave their belongings in fancy lockers adorned with stickers of fruits, while each of their visits takes place behind colorful doors. Which is to say, when Mina finds herself making a scene there because she’d mixed up her dates, the entire ordeal feels like it could’ve happened at a hospital or a retirement home. There’s an exasperated receptionist and many indifferent bystanders, but even as Mina escalates the confrontation, guards and wardens barely bat an eye.
Only Alma ends up moved by Mina’s fiery outburst. When she later sees her at a bus stop, Alma offers her a ride. And then, as she knows Mina is set to go back to the prison the next day (and do yet another three-hour journey for it), she invites her to stay at her lavish home. Mina, worried about her young kids doing the math about her long, grueling commute, cautiously accepts Alma’s gracious offer.
She’s right to be cautious. For Alma, nervous and excited to have company in her art-riddled country house (courtesy of her famed surgeon of a husband), goes a tad overboard in ingratiating herself into Mina’s life. No sooner have they exchanged the barest of pleasantries and life stories that she finds her a job and asks her to move in. Theirs is an odd and unlikely bond. It’s not quite a friendship, though they do commiserate about how they each also feel imprisoned, in a way, by their husbands’ circumstances. And there may be an alluring physical, if not quite erotic connection, that colors what can’t help but seem like a transactional kind of relationship. Quickly though, their differences become all too glaring, especially as it becomes clear they’re both running away from ghosts from their own pasts.
The women’s delicate dance is elevated and wonderfully fleshed out by two performances that feel nakedly vulnerable, all while suggesting there’s more we’re not being made privy to. Huppert is that rare actress whose warmth can feel seductive and dangerous at the same time. The candor with which her Alma greets Mina feels like an invitation, but also like a trap. The intensity Huppert carries in her gaze and in her gait (Alma, we learn, is a former dancer) is graceful; but at its edges, there’s something frayed and jagged. What is she getting out of this entire ordeal, anyways? Is this really a kind of selfless act, her white guilt allowing her to think she owes Mina her house and attention?
Herzi, meanwhile, plays Mina like a knotted blank canvas. The character reveals little with her expressions: a defensive mechanism that’s served her well in service jobs, and as a seeming (though not culpable) co-conspirator in the burglary that landed her husband in jail. That bungled job still threatens her livelihood, as she’s pursued by her husband’s violent partner in crime. As Mina is pushed to the edge, she’ll have to make a choice between her family and Alma that sets up a final act twist that’s both inevitable and surprising in equal measure.
The final confrontation “Visiting Hours” builds towards is utterly exhilarating. The fraught balance that Huppert and Herzi establish is suddenly upended. But rather than aim for a pat ending that would neatly paint one or the other as a villain, Mazuy’s screenplay — written alongside Pierre Courrège and François Begaudeau with the collaboration of Emilie Deleuze — arrives at something more complicated, exalting the bond these women forged while also suggesting there was no sustainable way their relationship could have continued
“Visiting Hours” is a film where lush reds (captured beautifully by Simon Beaufils’ intimate camerawork) and romantic swells (courtesy of Amine Bouhafa’s at times gorgeously strident score) help craft a bold melodrama that feels both old-fashioned, yet grounded in contemporary sensibilities and concerns. With a beautifully labyrinthian plot, Alma and Mina’s story is a modern fable about good samaritans and well-intentioned, moneyed, privileged people. And in the hands of two actresses working wonders with the physicality that ties their characters together, this is the kind of enjoyable French flick that grips you all the way through its winning, winking final shot.
