Comment on Valley of Love review: some peaks, more troughs as Gérard Dépardieu and Isabelle Huppert hike Death Valley

Guillaume Nicloux’s half-English language, semi-Lynchian heat-dream has the French icons reuniting after the death of their son, and features Dépardieu’s best turn in yearsGuillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love is a starry two-hander and a very contrived high-concept premise which, perhaps inevitably, leads us precisely nowhere. Nicloux appears to have developed his project by taking his actors and the fascinating Death Valley setting as a starting point — and hoping that an ending would materialise.It has not been much liked here in Cannes, but I found it partly redeemed by watchable turns from Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert; they have not appeared on screen together since Maurice Pialat’s Loulou in 1980, and Depardieu in particular gives a sweetly tender and understated performance, his best for some years.