Two and a half stars

Director: Julie Bertuccelli

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni

Rating: M

Running time: 94 minutes

Verdict: See it for the moving scenes between Deneuve and her real-life daughter

YOU haven’t met anyone quite like Claire Darling.

The almost brutally unsentimental title character in this strangely elusive French drama appears to care more for her vintage toys than her own daughter.

When we meet her, she’s in her 70s and played by the legendary French actor Catherine Deneuve, who layers the capricious heiress with her own cinematic history.

Certain that this will be her last day on earth, the avid collector makes an impulsive decision to declutter the family estate in which she now lives alone — perhaps in the hope of simultaneously clearing her mind, which she is keenly aware that she is losing to dementia. And so she organises a massive second-hand sale in the front yard, which has the (perhaps) unintended effect of summoning Marie (played by Deneuve’s real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni), the child from whom she has been estranged for 20 years.

As the valuable antiques and family heirlooms are snapped up by bargain-hunting villagers, the film flashes back to earlier, but hardly happier times.

Played as a young woman by Alice Taglioni, Claire is an unusually cold fish — at least as far as Marie is concerned; Claire’s behaviour after a mining accident involving her son suggests that she is, in fact, capable of deep emotion.

The unbreachable rift between mother and daughter is exacerbated by a terrible secret they share.

Other pieces of the narrative puzzle include Marie’s brother’s best friend (Samir Guesmi), with whom she has some kind of unresolved connection, and her own childhood playmate (Laure Calamy), who has an obsessive fascination for Claire’s elephant clock.

Claire Darling successfully evokes a haunted, museum-like quality that’s appropriate for a woman who prefers things to people, but while the missing pieces of the story might well be explained by Claire’s failing memory, too much is left unexplored or under-explained.

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