"I've Loved You So Long" sounded like one of those heavy French films that would turn out to be a "cultural" experience that is "good" for a viewer, like foul-tasting medicine, but that one wouldn't really recommend enthusiastically. However, it is as deeply moving as any good Hollywood tearjerker, and far more delicately made than many others. It does not pound you into submission like a Spielberg film does, or into thinking, "Oh, how terrible for her!" It lets you discover the events behind its storyline subtly and quietly.

Kristin Scott-Thomas (from "The English Patient") plays the leading role, and if you have been somewhat put-off by her presence and written her off as seeming "stuck-up", you won't after seeing this. In the role of Juliette Fontaine, a divorcee and mother who has been released after serving fifteen years in prison for killing her young son, she is immensely moving. At first she comes across as nothing more than an intensely neurotic (possibly psychotic) bitch, but as the layers of the plot are revealed and her character develops more and more, we begin to empathize with the torment her character must be going through.

Juliette has been released into the custody of her sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) and her less-than-understanding husband, Luc, who seems to be terrified of Juliette himself. It goes without saying that he flies off the handle at one point when Lea tells him that she has decided to let Juliette babysit their two adopted Vietnamese daughters.

As Juliette is re-introduced into society, she has to deal with the unintentional thoughtlessness and insensitivity of Lea and Luc's friends, almost none of whom have an idea of Juliette's real situation. Finding a job is not an easy task for her either; one potential employer simply throws her out after hearing that she has served time for what seems to be cold-blooded murder.

Eventually, the family warms to Juliette, and she begins to shed her defensive exterior and warm to them, even to the point where she is giving the children piano lessons (the film's title comes from an old French folk song, "A la claire fontaine", that one of Lea's daughters is trying to learn), tucking them into bed, and taking them to the zoo. But there is much more to the story than this, and novice director Philippe Claudel, who also wrote the screenplay, lets it all unfold gradually, saving the revelation which explains the truth about the events until the final scenes of the film. Claudel is, thankfully, not one of those directors who goes in for the latest "artsy", fancy MTV effects or jittery cameras, unlike Jonathan Demme, who, in his otherwise excellent "Rachel Getting Married", seems to be giving in to the latest trends.

The acting by all involved is exemplary, but Kristin Scott-Thomas deserves special mention, showing a gentle vulnerability that I had never seen before and which draws you instantly into her predicament. It is one of the few performances I have seen in which a seemingly unsympathetic character is slowly demonstrated to be completely and utterly kind after all, and Scott-Thomas accomplishes this without a trace of schmaltz or phoniness. She has already been nominated for a Golden Globe; if it does not lead to an Oscar nomination, she will have been robbed.

And in case my readers are wondering, yes, this is a French film with English subtitles, and yes, Ms. Scott-Thomas is as fluent in French as any native speaker (she has lived in France since she was nineteen and was once married to a Frenchman). But that definitely should not keep you away from this film.