Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I loved you so long)

‘Il y a longtemps que je t'aime’ better known as ‘I loved you so long’ features Kristen Scott Thomas speaking French. She plays Juliette Fontaine, just out of prison after fifteen years inside. Juliette is taken under the wing of her younger sister Léa, who goes out of her way to make her feel part of her family. Juliette seems a bit unnerved with this unexpected goodwill and at first, barely speaks at all and never mentions her life inside or what took her there. Whatever happened seems to weigh heavy on her and everyone skirting around the subject makes it worse.

She goes through the motions with a social worker and with her parole officer. An odd chap, who is obsessed with visiting the Orinoco that is until we are told that he inexplicably put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. She tries to get a job, not easy when the employers want to know why she’d been in jail but eventually she prevails. Getting back into something else she’s taken a sabbatical from for fifteen years proves a lot easier when she gets propositioned in a bar.



Right from the start, you know that there’s some big revelation on its way but the film makers keep it under wraps until the end. Details do come out but slowly. It turns out that Juliette was in prison for killing her six year old Son. Why? Well that’s the big secret. We are told that she offered nothing in her defence during her trial and that her husband testified against her.

Being a ‘child killer’ makes her a dubious guest for her sister to have in her house. Léa trusts her, which is a tremendous leap of faith considering she has two children, both adopted from Vietnam. Léa’s husband Luc clearly does not share his wife's trust, well certainly not at first, and he understandably fears leaving his kids alone with her. As the viewer, you're not sure who to side with.



As the film progresses along Juliette slowly opens up and starts to enjoy being back in the real world again. So far, so good, it’s a strong story and well told but it starts to go awry when she discloses at a dinner party that she was in prison for murder. Almost everyone assumes it’s a joke, illustrating I suppose that the French media hadn't given her case the saturation coverage it would have got over here and that nobody has had the forethought to ‘Google’ Léa’s mysterious sister who appeared from nowhere.

I feel a little cheated at the end because having been dangling on a thread for ninety minutes, wondering what the big secret was and I have to say enjoying it... bang, the film falls down a large plot hole.

Léa finds a picture of the murdered child along with a note written on the back of his medical card. Lea gets her doctor to check out the medical card and it is revealed that the child had a fatal illness, probably from birth. It appears that somehow Juliette chose to keep this secret from her husband, her sister and her parents.

Instead, being a doctor herself, she ended his suffering by injecting him with an overdose of something and then let everyone believe that she was a child murderer. For what reason? It is suggested to punish herself. For what? Saving her son undue suffering? Whilst at the same time she punishes everyone else around her by not telling them the truth. Then there’s what her fellow prisoners would have thought of her and they would of course had tried to inflict their own justice on her. She must really like self-punishment.

After her trial her parents disowned her and told Léa to do the same. Her father took this misunderstanding to his grave, in fact it probably helped kill him, and her mother took it with her into Alzheimer’s. They will never know the truth.

Even more unlikely was the fact she managed to keep her reasons secret. It’s just not plausible. Which failed A level law student defended her? Even the prosecution would have gone digging for a motive. Didn’t they perform an autopsy? Consult doctor’s notes? It’s just like in ‘The Reader’ but more so.

This implausibility ruined an otherwise good film, which is a shame because otherwise it was excellent!