The brawl at the beginning of Ursula Meier’s “The Line” makes for a fitting start to a film about damage — the kind that only family can cause.
In operatic slow-motion, Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) assaults her mother, Christina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), banging her head against the keys of a grand piano. Relatives intervene, casting the aggressor out into the snowy backyard where she’ll remain, in a sense, throughout the rest of this emotionally probing French-language drama.
How did it come to this? The simple answer is banal — something to do with a mean comment Christina had made — but the bigger picture fills out as Meier tracks Margaret’s efforts to reconnect with her family.
It’s no easy task considering the temporary restraining order filed against Margaret, which prohibits her from coming within 100 meters of the family home, a perimeter demarcated in baby-blue paint by her younger sister Marion (Elli Spagnolo). Most days, Margaret — a musician with anger issues and the eldest of Christina’s three daughters — loiters just outside this boundary, occasionally helping Marion practice her singing. A pariah with a pixie cut, Blanchoud’s Margaret is a brooding, Marlon Brando-esque loner, her eyes perpetually radiating hurt.
Fascinating as Margaret is, the film keeps us mostly in the dark about her life beyond the family. The character study turns out to be half-baked as Meier turns her attention to the group dynamics that might have produced Margaret’s instability.
Christina, a single mother and pianist whose career was sidelined by Margaret’s birth, is a squawking tornado of egotism and resentment. The fight leaves her partly deaf in one ear, which she uses to justify her petty behavior, giving Margaret the silent treatment and forcing her other daughters, Marion and pregnant Louise (India Hair), to put up with her prima donna theatrics.
The cinematographer Agnès Godard shoots the wintry Swiss setting in desiccated blue tones, making the empty field between the line and the house look particularly purgatorial. Similarly, the film is at its strongest when it focuses, in its more understated scenes, on a distressing human tendency: to create distance between ourselves and those who know us best.
The Line
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.
