There is a French Film Festival on in Christchurch currently.
Watched at the Academy. Rating: 3/5
Marguerite Hoffman is a PhD student at France’s École Normale Supérieure, which is legendary in science circles for churning out geniuses at a rate it might take one of its graduates to compute.
As one of the very few women studying at this level, let alone one working with celebrated professor Werner on the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis, she is being interviewed by a student journalist. Mousy and monotone, Marguerite is not a great interview.
The day an error is discovered in her thesis, she is devastated. In a dizzy spell, she leaves the school, wipes out the past, and dives into the real world, discovers autonomy, befriends and moves in with Noa (a dancer), and has sex for the first time. Grown by her experiences, it is in this new momentum that she finds a correct version of her theorem which was to prove the Goldbach Theorem..
I was interested enough to delve very shallowly into the world of mathematics, but only to find out about Goldbach. All the maths was stratospherically over my head.
Goldbach’s conjecture, from 1742, is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in number theory and all of mathematics. It states that every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
The only number theorem I’d ever heard about up till now is the Fibonacci sequence. So I guess I learnt something.
I found the movie interesting in that Marguerite’s lack of personality is something the actress manages to maintain. I was overwhelmed when the entire apartment in which she and Noa lived was painted with blackboard paint so that Marguerite could write all the symbols which made absolutely no sense to me at all.
The one thing that did make sense to me was Marguerite’s ability at the game of Mahjong (and the undercurrent of illegal betting) which enabled her to pay the rent for the apartment.
Film & Food 