Un amour impossible (2018)
Directed by Catherine Corsini

Film Review

Catherine Corsini's follow-up to her acclaimed 2015 drama La Belle saison, a devastatingly true-to-life account of a lesbian love affair, is another similarly intense portrayal of enduring love, this time between a mother and daughter whose lives are both blighted by the same odious self-regarding male.  Un amour impossible is adapted from a novel of the same title by Christine Angot, one of a series of books in which the best-selling author draws on her own life experiences to construct some powerfully moving explorations of the human psyche.  Angot's well-developed appreciation of the fragility and resilience of the female spirit is much in evidence in the film she recently scripted with Claire Denis, Un beau soleil intérieur (2017).

In adapting Angot's dense and complex novel, which covers a period of fifty years in the lives of its protagonists, Corsini and her co-screenwriter Laurette Polmanss certainly had their work cut out.  By taking too literary an approach (which is overly reliant on a voiceover narration) the film fails to have the dramatic impact that it might have done with a looser, less slavishly faithful, adaptation.  Even so,  despite its reluctance to cut corners which results in a slightly daunting 135 minute run time, Un amour impossible manages to be a compelling piece of film drama that absolutely resonates with human feeling.  With its shocking depiction of a man taking advantage of the power he has over the female protagonists the film chimes with contemporary outrage over male exploitation of women.

The melodramatic plot looks as if it owes quite a lot to Thomas Hardy and George Eliot.  With its harrowing account of an immaculate young woman succumbing to a good-for-nothing bounder from a higher social class, who abandons her, leaves her with a child and then returns to reap even greater havoc there are distinct shades of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Adam Bede.  Rather than portray the female protagonists as mere victims of male dominance, as was customary in most 19th century literature,  the film's authors take a more positive slant and show them to be the nobler and more resilient sex, whilst their male tormentor, far from being the Übermensch he thinks he is, is nothing more than a morally vacuous narcissist.

Such is the perverse nature of human desire that the most virtuous of women, a hardworking Jewish girl named Rachel, ends up being irresistibly drawn to the unworthiest of men, a self-loving bourgeois intellectual named Philippe.  Romantic intoxication is a splendid thing whilst it lasts, but when it is time to wake up and nurse the hangover Rachel's folly becomes all too evident.  Even though he has put a good woman in the family way Philippe has no intention of marrying such a lowly creature.  He makes no attempt to conceal his class prejudices and anti-Semitic feelings, and so he exits stage left and leaves poor Rachel to bring up her little daughter alone.  Rachel is not one to give up easily on her dreams of conjugal felicity, so she devotes herself to trying to coerce her lover into doing the decent thing by her.  When Philippe does finally return to her it is not a happy ending that he brings but an even ghastlier demonstration of masculine thoughtlessness, only this time it is Rachel's daughter Chantal who is on the receiving end.

On paper, all this sounds like pure soap - the stuff of 1930s melodrama.  What elevates it above this tawdry level and gives it a biting authenticity are the extraordinarily vivid performances from the two lead actors, Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider.  In what is arguably her best dramatic performance to date, Efira (a former Belgian television presenter) compels us to sympathise with her somewhat naive character, an innocent who is violently led astray by her romantic impulses to love a man who, whilst her superior in class and education, is completely beneath her in moral and human terms.

The seductive charm that Niels Schneider exudes so effortlessly makes Rachel appear less foolish than she might otherwise have done, but when Philippe's true nature reveals itself Schneider has no difficulty painting him as the vilest specimen of humanity to have walked the earth.  We know that Efira's pursuit of Schneider after he abandons her cannot end well, but what ensues when he does return to her proves to be even more shocking than our worst expectations.

The abject unsuitability of the pairing of two such contrasting characters is driven home to great effect by the film's bold visual representation of the world's they inhabit.  The sunny pastoral landscape that is home to Rachel speaks of her unspoiled idealistic nature, whilst the claustrophobic urban maze that is Paris reflects the mean-spirited self-absorption of Philippe.  In the end it is not class or race that makes the love affair between Rachel and Philippe impossible, it is their contrasting moral natures.  Opposites may attract, but that doesn't mean they should tie the connubial knot.  Catherine Corsini's latest remarkable film makes this point with a delicacy that is almost heart-breaking.

Film Synopsis

Towards the end of the 1950s, Rachel is a modest office worker in her early twenties who lives in the central French town of Châteauroux.  A romantic by nature, she feels she has found the man of her dreams in Philippe, a handsome young intellectual from a better class of family than her own.  The latter, a self-adoring Parisian, is temporarily located in the region, engaged on translation work for the military.  An intense love affair ensues, which results in Rachel becoming pregnant.  Philippe has no intention of marrying beneath him, so he abandons his lover, leaving her to bring up her daughter Chantal alone.  Rachel never gives up on her hope that one day Philippe will return to her and assume paternity of the daughter he walked away from.  But when her former lover does come back to her things do not take a turn for the better...