From left: French actor Louis Garrel, French actress Marion Cotillard, French director Nicole Garcia and Spanish actor Alex Brendemuhl pose as they arrive on May 15, for the screening of the film ‘Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon)’ at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. (AFP)

LOS ANGELES, May 16, (RTRS): A film prone to cutting on an unfallen tear, “From the Land of the Moon” from French director Nicole Garcia is as syrupy a confection as ever dripped from the pen of Nicholas Sparks (though inspired by the novel “Mal di Pietre” by Milena Angus). Given a gloss of respectability by the tastefulness of Garcia’s style, the genteel photography from Christophe Beaucarne, an unobjectionable score from Daniel Pemberton and a performance of tremulous commitment from Marion Cotillard (as per), as well as by its ineffable Frenchness, that last quality might be enough to bring those who equate “French” with “artistic” to the yard. But even they may find themselves choking on this bonbon during a credibility-assassinating final act reveal.

Cotillard plays Gabrielle, who at the film’s opening is a (slightly unconvincingly) young woman in rural France, nursing a wild crush on the local village schoolteacher — understandable as he looks like the Athena poster version of a booksmart hunk. In a segment that acts a self-contained cautionary tale against lending books to impressionable girls, especially when the book is “Wuthering Heights” — hello, signals — Gabrielle flings herself at him in front of his pregnant wife and her own unloving mother, only to be rejected, and to flee through the nearby forest in response.

This forest-fleeing is such representative behavior on the part of the tempestuously emotional Gabrielle that the scene is repeated more or less verbatim later on, following another rejection from another hunk. By this time, Gabrielle, under threat of the loony bin otherwise, has married Jose (an understatedly sympathetic Alex Brendemuhl), a saturnine Spanish bricklayer first approached for the role of Gabrielle’s husband by her mother, who is anxious to get her off her hands, believing her troubled daughter “needs a man.”

Gabrielle would agree with that, but Jose is not the man she thinks she needs. That spot is taken by the story’s other dreamboat: the obviously named Andre Sauvage (Louis Garrel bringing strong “brood” game). He’s a lieutenant in the French army sent to the same spa/sanitarium in which Gabrielle is recovering from a kidney stone ailment (the film’s title in French is “Mal de Pierres,” literally meaning “evil stones” the French term for this illness), and he ticks every nonsense box on the fantasy-man checklist. He’s handsome; he’s dying; he’s isolated; he’s in great pain — his ripped body constantly contorted into Caravaggian attitudes of suffering amid tousled bedclothes. He has a snazzy uniform in the closet. He plays the piano.

Their brief amour fou, and his promise that he will send for her, become the defining events of Gabrielle’s life. But, back with the superhumanly long-suffering Jose, months pass without hearing from him, and Gabrielle gives birth to a son, Marc. The months stretch into years, and Marc grows into a promising young pianist.

Of course, Cotillard is your first call if you want an actress to suffer exquisitely, but the issue is her character Gabrielle is essentially a nightmare of self-involvement, whose emotional torture is very difficult to get invested in since she herself has already bought all the shares. And really, that is all there is to her — not a particularly affectionate or engaged mother to Marc, a frosty wife to Jose and with no discernible outside interests or skills, Gabrielle evidently has but one ambition in life, to experience a grand folie a deux-style love affair. Which might on the one hand make her admirably single-minded, but it also makes her quite perfectly boring.

Garcia, like many actors-cum-helmers has a fairly good track record of directing her actors to strong performances (Catherine Deneuve in “Place Vendome,” for example, or Daniel Auteuil in “The Adversary”). But Cotillard is given nothing else to do here except alternate reproachful glares.

And even that might be enough (such is the magnetism of Cotillard) were it not for the final indignity of an ending which betrays not only the audience, and Gabrielle, but also the film’s initially progressive inclination to explore the self-actualization process of a woman repressed by a loveless marriage and the social mores of 1950s France. Instead we get this borderline pastiche of the French romantic melodrama, that might more accurately be titled “From The Land of The Moon-Eyed” until that risible final act twist that jeopardizes its purchase on the romantic imagination of even the most sentimental viewer.

Cotillard says the inspiration for her portrayal of the heroine, Gabrielle, in “Mal de Pierres” was the wildness and “fire” of director, Nicole Garcia.

The film — also billed as “From the Land of the Moon” — premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday and is one of 21 movies in competition for the Palme d’Or prize.

Cotillard, who won an Oscar in 2008 for playing Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose”, says of Garcia: “I was very inspired by Nicole, she carries in her this fire, this passion, this wildness that Gabrielle carries. That was my first source of inspiration.”

“She manages not to be what people would want her to be,” the 40-year-old told Reuters in an interview on Sunday.

Cotillard stars as a young woman in post World War Two France, driven by her desire to find love but married off by her parents to Spanish farmer Jose, played by Alex Brendemuehl.

She sees her chance to escape the confines of her life with Jose when she meets Indochinese war veteran, Andre, played by Louis Garrel.

Adapted from Milena Agus’s 2006 novel “Mal di Pietre”, Cotillard and Garcia had discussed making the book into a film several years ago, but had to wait while Cotillard fulfilled other work committments. She starred in five films last year and will feature at least in four in 2016.

“Marion was just the right person for the role,” Garcia told a news conference.

“I don’t know who else could have portrayed this character, it’s only Marion who conveys this sensuality, my feeling is that her body is so expressive.”

Garcia last presented a film — “Charlie Says” — at Cannes in 2006 and her only previous entry was “The Adversary” in 2002.