Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi on the bill for “The Prisoner of Bordeaux”, a powerful duo of prisoners’ wives

Patricia Mazuy’s latest film traces a unique friendship between two prisoners’ wives, one a wealthy bourgeois, the other a young mother from the suburbs. This meeting will change their destinies.

An encounter. Two characters, seemingly so distant, but in reality so close, because they are faced with the same state, that of a prisoner’s wife. Two actresses, Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi, who had never acted together and who make up an almost obvious duo. The film is based on this encounter The Prisoner of Bordeaux by Patricia Mazuy, in theaters August 28.

Alma is a woman on the edge of the void. In her Bordeaux mansion, she is bored stiff, except for her weekly visit to the prison. Mina, for her part, runs between her visiting rooms three and a half hours away by train, her two children and her job as a laundress in a dry cleaner in Narbonne. It is in the reception house of the penitentiary center that the two women meet. One has chosen the wrong day for her visit and feigns discomfort to appease the guards, the other seems seduced by the audacity of her neighbor in the visiting room.

Two wives, two social backgrounds that are complete opposites. Although they frequent the same prison, one visits a jewelry store robber, the other a renowned neurologist. From the coming together of these two opposites will be born a liberating energy.

The friendship is total from the outset, without half measures. Very quickly Alma invites Mina to her huge house, she finds her a job as a laundress in her husband’s clinic and takes care of her two children. The three newcomers are far from this bourgeois and wealthy world and we can immediately guess the cracks to come. The gap is too great to imagine a common future. But the dazzling encounter will nevertheless profoundly change the two women.

If the social divide is sometimes too demonstrative, Patricia Mazuy, more inclined to explore the hearts of men in her previous feature films, signs a formidable film of actresses. A portrait of two visiting women, two fellow prisoners they like to say, as the life of those who wait is also a prison. Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi embody these improbable friends with disconcerting ease. The gentleness that emerges from them radiates.

About her on-screen partner, Isabelle Huppert has few words, but they say it all. “It’s like in music, it’s the perfect chord,” she told the audience at a preview screening when the film was presented at Cannes’ Quinzaine des Cinémas last May.Hafsia, it is less is more, that is to say, the less she says, the more we sense things and the more we understand them.”

The casting was not at all obvious, however. When she learned that André Téchiné had already shot the film a few months earlier The People Next Door with the same duo of actresses, Patricia Mazuy is furious: “I was really pissed off, says the director known for her frankness. I wanted to fire Hafsia, she continues, laughing. Finally, she put her hair up, it got a little bigger, it did something else.”