Patricia Mazuy is one of the greatest directors working today, but you’d hardly know it from how often her films are screened or talked about. Each release, then, becomes an occasion for a stronger (and, hopefully, less insular or cultish) case for her films to break out of a parochial point of view, one centred, for the time being, within France or New York. Her latest, Visiting Hours, presents a bit of a problem in this sense. While it features Isabelle Huppert in a key role, just like in Saint-Cyr, the director and actor’s previous collaboration, Huppert provides color and ballast in her role as Alma — self-mockingly calling herself the “bourgeois pal” of the film’s central, unexpected couple — rather than assuming the role of a protagonist.
Mazuy’s usual way of developing character is through impulse, friction, and total commitment to an idea. Her characters never self-destruct completely, but they’re allergic to self-preservation, and vault past the bounds of acceptable behavior and genre constraints alike. Mina (Hafsia Herzi) is nothing like that. In the film’s inciting scene, we learn one important detail: she is bad at lying. So bad, in fact, that Alma finds the fact that she dares to nevertheless try — in order to keep her elapsed visiting slot at a Bordeaux prison — an eccentric, attractive flaw. Both Alma and Mina have husbands serving time, and because Alma has a house whose walls are covered with an art collection and tables adorned with flowers, but whose many rooms are empty, she invites Mina in. She does so without forethought, a luxury she enjoys and thrives on, as seen in the scenes where the two womens’ routines and working lives become intermixed: whatever Mina needs, Alma can suddenly, almost superfluously, pay for (like a PS5 for Mina’s two kids) or lie to obtain (like a school placement after a sudden change of district).
Mazuy, whose choice of setting is usually rural and isolated, but is here suburban, is clearly a filmmaker who enjoys the challenge of making an idiosyncratic film about people who, because of a pocket of available time, and the shared experience of misfortune, fall into fascination with one another. Unlike something like Mikhaël Hers’ The Passengers of the Night, where the film’s open door is a question of care and charity and agency, neither character in Visiting Hours can consider themselves free: their proximity to their husbands is a requirement, and one they don’t intend to rend entirely. Their anger remains locked inside. As a distraction or a cure, they genuinely try to know each other: Alma leads with a disarming backstory, and Mina allows Alma to feel useful, listened to, and less of a ghost in her own house.
But this is, of course, not a simple, inspiring story of sisterhood. Mazuy is far too interested in what remains hidden, in ruination, and in the way all interactions contain the capacity for limit-testing, good and ill. What makes Visiting Hours appear to be a minor work, or a deviation, is that the class division of the characters, and the social-legal organization of their lives, means that their ability to act is carefully measured — while not in the original French title, the ironic “Hours” and their measuring toll are important to how Mazuy considers narrative possibility in the film. That is, that if lying is key to how these characters meet, it is also the basis on which they interact with the world: the lie of optimism, and the easily frayed truth of putting up with a situation so long as it serves certain needs.
More than one critic has wondered if Visiting Hours’ climax falls into too many expectations about the differences between hosts and guests, class differences and backgrounds, but Mazuy, at the very least, can be trusted to convey far more than these surface details. Her characters never care much for the future, because they’re too busy making use of their present conditions for expression, even over survival. When Mina commits a relatively small and ineffective, yet still devastating, act late in the film, it’s an obvious risk, and a coded manner of betrayal. But more than that it’s a transcendent manoeuvre, both brave and empty — an act of cowardice that veils something as counterintuitively generative as any of the climaxes in Mazuy’s other films. The difference is that this time, boundaries remain unbroken, and closure settles in. For Mazuy, it’s a strange change of pace, but Visiting Hours remains a film with an uncommon lively streak, even if its range of expression is ultimately limited relative to the director’s best work.
Published as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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