The three Brontë sisters struggle through life--right before they will be immortalized for their literary masterpieces.

André Techiné crafts a classic of French cinema, first released in 1979. Although the film focuses on the famous English authoresses, the film is in French. It features events from the life of Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, which was an immediate bestseller in her lifetime; Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, received dismally at first and only later lauded as a genius work after she had died; and Anne Brontë, author of Agnes Grey, a novel still overlooked for her sisters’ works. The youngest and most pure, Anne was arguably the most overlooked Brontë in life as well. The sisters took on the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively to publish their works initially, knowing it would be hard to break into the stiff-lipped literary industry, let alone as women. The sisters are played by now-renowned French actresses Marie-France Pisier, Isabelle Adjani, and Isabelle Huppert; along with the somewhat underappreciated Pascal Greggory as their brother Branwell, the weaselly, voracious artist whose desires come to consume him.

The characters appear to have lived their own stories--or, in other words, lived as victims of their own stories. They are clearly close siblings; and perhaps it’s that closeness that allows them to harbor unfiltered, angry feelings toward each other. Though they are still held back by the invisible mosquito net of pre-Victorian era formalities; the tenseness of etiquette is felt throughout the film like a lady’s corset. Branwell slips into alcoholism and careless despair after he is rejected by the older married woman with whom he had an affair, Charlotte pines after her schoolmaster, and Emily runs wild in the moors, garbed as a boy. She’s stubborn until the moment she realizes she is fatally sick, and only admits to seeing a doctor when it is too late, dying at age 30.

The film is unquestionably well made. It’s visually masterful, making use of chiaroscuro--the dichotomy of light and dark--and there’s very little sound at all, even less music. At the dead of night, the sound of a pen scratching will make you wince. The oldest, Charlotte, was the only one to live out to old age, rather, older age, as she died at the age of only 38. We watch the other three siblings die young, and as Charlotte is not quite the main character either, there is the feeling that death is everywhere, like a sickness. Quiet, waiting; not like a monster or personification like the Grim Reaper. In the film, death is a stillness, a cease in animation. And life in the remote English moors is “about clinging to the impression of still living,” describes an old drunken man at the beginning of the film, sitting in a bar. The Brontë sisters live stifling lives; life itself crawls at such a pace it looks like death when it pauses for a second. The film’s colors, movements, expressions are muted, and it’s successfully conveyed that the lives of the Brontë sisters were likely very miserable. The last word spoken in the film, from a flashback, is “ordinary.” And yet the Brontë sisters were anything but, according to their work. The film portrays how miserable their everyday lives were; the fact that they still struggled and persisted makes them extraordinary.