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‘Jealousy’ heals the child within

Louis Garrel and Anna Mouglalis star in Philippe Garrel’s “Jealousy.” DISTRIB FILMS/Distrib Films

The title word comes up only once in Philippe Garrel’s “Jealousy,” a bittersweet sketch of misplaced love and emotional confusion — and even that once is only in jest. Jealousy itself does not dominate the film, at least not in the pathological tradition of Proust’s “Swann in Love.” Instead, turmoil and capriciousness rule the hearts of most of the characters, all the more striking because of the film’s compassionate detachment and unemphatic narrative, rendered in a timeless black and white by veteran cinematographer Willy Kurant (Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 “Masculine Feminine”). The effect is both nostalgic and vividly fresh as Garrel creates the illusion that French cinema never left the early ’60s, and might make you regret it ever actually did.

That reference to jealousy occurs late in the film, when Louis (Garrel’s son and frequent collaborator, Louis), a struggling actor, teases his daughter Charlotte (Olga Milshtein) about her feelings about his new girlfriend, Claudia (Anna Mouglalis). Charlotte first appears in the opening scene, peering through a keyhole as her anguished mother, Clothilde (Rebecca Convenant) and her father argue about his decision to leave the family and live with Claudia, an actress he has fallen in love with. As it turns out, Charlotte’s point of view proves the most discerning; she remains an anchor of common sense while the adults careen into self-destructiveness.

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Much of that misery comes from the best intentions. Despite his ruthlessness in leaving Clothilde, Louis is a romantic. He believes in the primacy and purity of his art, and his love for Claudia verges on the obsessive. Claudia also loves Louis with a desperate neediness — in one scene she runs back to their garret apartment driven by a sudden fear that he has left her — but it’s mixed with cold self-interest. Unlike Louis, she doesn’t relish being a starving artist.

Louis, though, persists in his vain idealism. Bantering with friends, he reveals how desperate he would be if Claudia left him, and one jokes about him emulating Goethe’s Werther. That kind of sadness lingers beneath the surface of the film, which, if it had a harder emotional and visual edge, might bring to mind a tragedy like Louis Malle’s “The Fire Within” (1963), rather than a François Truffaut romp starring Jean-Pierre Léaud.

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Such softness — underscored by a sometimes sentimental soundtrack — limits “Jealousy.” But in terms of the director’s life, it suggests a turning point. Like many of the films in Garrel’s five-decade-long career, most of it unfamiliar to Anglophone audiences, “Jealousy” is autobiographical. Like Charlotte, Garrel had a father leave home, under similar circumstances.

Hence the primacy of Charlotte’s perspective. As performed with effortless skill by Milshtein, the sunny Charlotte might represent Garrel’s coming to terms with his past, and the relatively rosy tone of the film could open his work to a wider audience.

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Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.