The Zola Experience review – life follows art as stage relationship spills into real-life romance

The Guardian

07-07-2025

Art and life fuse deliriously in Gianluca Matarrese's hybrid film, which alternates between documentary and fiction, theatre and cinema. Recently divorced from her husband, actor-director Anne Barbot throws herself into preparing a stage adaptation of Emile Zola's classic novel L'Assommoir. In Gervaise, the working-class heroine of the book, Barbot finds echoes of her current situation: both are women who struggle to reclaim professional autonomy in the aftermath of broken relationships. Barbot's production becomes more complicated when she casts Benoît Dallongeville, a neighbour who is also an actor, in the role of her love interest in the play. Soon, passion and tension begin to spill from personal relationships on to the page, and vice versa.
Matarrese's film keeps the camera strikingly close to Barbot and Dallongeville as the pair embark on a long and physically arduous rehearsal process. Jagged, handheld closeups of minute facial expressions and gestures clue us into private emotions that may be unknown even to the two actors. We can sense that, in the beginning, Dallongeville is interested in courting Barbot, though she is pulling back. Yet, over long takes in which they feed each other lines, a certain chemistry gradually emerges, followed by actual romance. The film keeps this development deliberately opaque, as scene transitions make it difficult to tell whether they are reading a script or communicating as themselves. It is as if the border between performance and life has entirely collapsed.
Reflecting the ebb and flow of emotions between Barbot and Dallongeville, the film swiftly moves on and off stage as the couple continue their rehearsals – and later on, heated arguments – over trips to the forest and the beach. While the varied locations offer a sense of spontaneity, the film occasionally feels too beholden to its art-versus-life thesis, which makes moments of catharsis come off as mannered and calculated. It has the look of a John Cassavetes film, but lacks that film-maker's sense of unpredictability.
The Zola Experience is on True Story from 11 July