Cannes 2024 (Directors’ Fortnight): Visiting Hours (by Patricia Mazuy) | Review

Visiting Hours (original title: La Prisonnière de Bordeaux) is a snapshot of two characters meeting at a pivotal point in each of their lives. Alma (Isabelle Huppert), a wealthy white woman, is making a routine visit to her husband in prison. On the same day, Mina (Hafsia Herzi), a poor North African woman, attempts to visit her husband but is turned away by the front desk. Alma takes notice and offers to give Mina a ride, which begins a very fast-moving friendship. Eventually, Alma offers Mina and her two children to live in her home, out of some combination of empathy, pity, and boredom.

The film largely inhibits the perspective of Mina as the outsider. Alma is somewhat of an elusive force in the film, in no small part due to Huppert’s portrayal of the character. A more cliché approach may have painted her as helpless and naive; while Alma often seems unaware of her own privilege, which Mina picks up on, she occasionally flashes hints of a subtle class consciousness that makes her character feel unreadable. Alma is mostly marked by a detrimental loneliness, one that the film implies began far before her husband’s imprisonment. 

Mina and her children’s arrival in Alma’s life seems to be the first connection she’s had in years, and the two get along swimmingly at first. But their strong chemistry is underlined by a growing one-sided class tension, and as Mina continues to live in Alma’s home she realizes how little they actually understand one another. Even their single commonality of having husbands in prison is askew. Alma’s husband, a wealthy neurosurgeon, had been imprisoned for killing a mother and daughter while driving drunk; Mina’s husband was caught up in a jewelry robbery. Of course, Mina’s husband is serving more time in prison for his crime.

A dinner party scene perfectly embodies this theme: one night, Mina walks in on a dinner party Alma has hosted with her bourgeois friends, one of whom mistakes Mina for a new housemaid. Here Mazuy uses a very striking shot-reverse shot to juxtapose two sides of the home; Alma and her friends, and Mina and her children across a doorway. The camera lingers uncomfortably on the stares of the dinner party guests, and Mina begins to understand herself as Alma’s experiment.

There is an additional plotline with Mina’s husband, whose crime is deliberately left murky: all the audience gets is that during the ordeal, his robbery partner somehow died, and his partner’s brother has since been harassing Mina for some sort of recuperation. This becomes important as the film ramps up to the very predictable tipping point à la Parasite that Mina inevitably arrives upon.

However, though there are many high stakes in the plot, nothing is ever exaggerated or overdone. Visiting Hours doesn’t implode by its climax, rather, it ends with a powerfully subtle open ending in line with the movie’s strengths. The premise is nothing super new, but the movie is worthwhile due to its formidable parts to a whole: mainly, Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi both more than deliver for their characters, each providing a silent depth that makes true understanding unattainable for the audience. This is topped off with extremely competent cinematography and sound design, which work to boost Visiting Hours into something that functions beyond its simple story at a glance.

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