Charlotte Gainsbourg is quickly becoming to grief what Angela Lansbury was to murders in small New England towns. In The Tree, the mistress of melancholy plays a young mother whose life is uprooted when her husband dies and a massive Moreton Bay fig threatens to destroy her home.
Julie Bertuccelli’s slow-paced, lingering style and beautiful shots of Australian landscapes create a unique and slightly mystical atmosphere – visually The Tree is stunning. But the titular plant becomes such an overbearing presence that it dominates the film, leaving the audience with nothing to ponder, except how odd Bertuccelli’s metaphor is.
During the film, the tree becomes a source of escape, a magical parental substitute for imaginative children, an opponent for a new romantic rival and finally a threat to the foundation of the family when grief overwhelms. But Bertuccelli remains strangely non-committal about whether the tree is a mystical force or merely a platform for psychological projection. Either approach would have worked if developed fully, but ultimately Bertuccelli’s strategy seems indecisive and unconvincing.

The film uses the tree plays as a totem of everything that is happening in the family members’ lives. The device not only unbalances the home, but the film’s basic structure. As a result, the characters’ routine and relationships outside of the family remain largely unexplored. The effect is that there is no natural sense of time or development, and so the family are reduced to awkwardly stating how much time has passed since their bereavement. Ironically, by presenting the story as a series of fragmented tree-focused moments, the flow of the film feels decidedly inorganic.
Gainsbourg is immensely watchable, and young Mogana Davies puts in a wonderful turn as her precocious and stubborn daughter Simone. Bertuccelli has created the bones of an interesting, thought-provoking and atmospheric exploration of grief but the tree gets in the way. Like you know what, metaphors need space and air to grow.