Anaïs Demoustier and Vincent Lacoste very inspired in a love story sealed by secrets and shame

This fourth feature film by Katell Quillévéré is the story of a love between two people who carry a heavy secret, a romantic story partly inspired by the director’s grandmother.

After adapting to the screen Repair the livingthe novel by Maylis de Kerangal in 2016, the director of A violent poison (2010) and Suzanne (2013), signs a fourth feature film in which she directs a unique love story in the post-war years. The time to love, First Prize (Valois de Diamant) of the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, released in theaters on November 29.

Madeleine’s (Anaïs Demoustier) secret is revealed from the first images of the film, in black and white. Archives. It is the Liberation, the soldiers are welcomed with jubilation. Then joy gives way to brutality. Women are shorn, pushed around, humiliated. Their crime: having maintained relations with German soldiers. Madeleine is among these women.

Secrets and lies

We find her a few years later, on the Breton coast, far from her village and her family, alone with a fatherless little boy named Daniel. She is a waitress in a tourist hotel in Brittany. It is there, on the beach, that she meets François, a pale and lame young man from a good family, a kind and romantic doctoral student. Between them, the current passes, but one day, François, suddenly very gloomy, disappears without explanation. When he returned a few weeks later, he was smiling again. Despite the secret that Madeleine entrusts to him concerning the birth of Daniel, François decides to marry him and adopt the child.

Later, Madeleine discovers that François also has a secret that he has been careful not to reveal to her. No matter, while little Daniel wonders endlessly about his biological father, refusing to believe him to be dead as they try to make him swallow, François and Madeleine head to a sulphurous dance hall in Châteauroux, where Soldiers from the nearby American base come to fight.

“Only in the place where the secret acts, life also begins”

Will these lies and secrets, carried by shame, break or seal their love? This is what unravels this fourth film by Katell Quillévéré, inspired by the life of her own grandmother. In a perfectly orchestrated production, with a camera often moving, which follows the characters very closely, the director offers a film of great intensity. A tension reinforced by the interpretation of Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste and the children, all totally inhabited by their characters.

Very dense, almost too dense as it is nourished by complex themes, the film explores the passage of time – almost twenty years – on this singular love story, formed between two unusual beings. Katell Quillévéré does not hesitate to radically illuminate the desires and torments that haunt the protagonists in sex scenes without taboos and without ellipses. The filmmaker subtly explores all these forms of prevented love, and the spirit of resistance which allows exceptional beings to make them flourish, against all odds.

Through the destiny of this funny family, ahead of its time, the film paints a picture of post-war France up to the 1960s, still tightly bound in the shackles of social conventions. The director manages to articulate and explore all these issues in a tense, but clear narration, in which this idea borrowed from Stefan Zweig by the character of François is deployed.“only in the place where the secret acts, life also begins.”

The sheet

Gender : Drama, Romance
Director: Katell Quillévéré
Actors: Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Paul Beaurepaire
Country : France
Duration : 2:05
Exit : November 29, 2023
Distributer : Gaumont Distribution
Synopsis : 1947. On a beach, Madeleine, waitress in a hotel-restaurant, mother of a little boy, meets François, a rich and cultured student. Between them, it’s obvious. Providence. If we know what she wants to leave behind by following this young man, we discover over time what François is trying to flee by mixing Madeleine’s destiny with his own…