An Impossible Love | Little White Lies

An Impos­si­ble Love

03 Jan 2019 / Released: 04 Jan 2019

Two people embracing at a formal event, a man in a suit and a woman in a white dress.
Two people embracing at a formal event, a man in a suit and a woman in a white dress.
4

Anticipation.

All the right people have been hyping this title.

5

Enjoyment.

A romantic drama that becomes a social commentary that takes on an impossible scope.

4

In Retrospect.

Virginie Efira, Catherine Corsini and Christine Angot is a potent brew.

Cather­ine Corsi­ni adapts Chris­tine Angot to cap­ti­vat­ing effect in this Châteauroux-set roman­tic drama.

Cather­ine Corsini’s An Impos­si­ble Love, adapt­ed from Chris­tine Angot’s nov­el, is a Tro­jan Horse of a movie. On the sur­face it is a sen­su­al romance: there are sweep­ing flur­ries of piano music care of Grégoire Het­zel; idyl­lic, sun-kissed land­scapes are cap­tured by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jeanne Lapoirie; and a soft, fem­i­nine voiceover is sup­plied by Jehn­ny Beth.

Yet the film’s essen­tial frame­work shows how trau­ma is passed on from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion – specif­i­cal­ly, from moth­er to daugh­ter – and how the patri­archy enables abus­es of pow­er to occur with­out con­se­quence. Under­neath all that is an iron­clad mon­u­ment to female resilience: women endure as expe­ri­ence forces our eyes to open.

Châteauroux (where Angot was born) is the loca­tion where work­ing class Rachel (Vir­ginie Efi­ra) lives and meets the bour­geois, world­ly Philippe (Niels Schnei­der). They rapid­ly embark on a very sexy rela­tion­ship. Your skin is like silk,” he says with awe, kiss­ing every inch of her body. You could have any man.” She smiles like the prover­bial cat that got the cream: It’s you I want to charm.” Rachel’s cousin is soon to be mar­ried and she thinks that Philippe will pop the ques­tion too.

A swoon­ing, fren­zied tone builds the momen­tum of a clas­sic screen romance. A nar­ra­tion by Rachel and Phillipe’s child lends a sense of inevitabil­i­ty to this affair blos­som­ing into some­thing beau­ti­ful. Bliss­ful waves of amour and plea­sure-flushed faces pro­pel the nar­ra­tive, until Philippe, so far a per­fect arche­type of a Roman­tic Hero, begins to trans­gress this mould.

Schnei­der, all insou­ciant gold­en beau­ty, is often cast as a ras­cal, so see­ing him cast as an earnest lover is a big sur­prise. He is per­fect­ly awful – or awful­ly per­fect – espe­cial­ly as Philippe’s true colours begin to show. He deliv­ers dev­as­tat­ing dis­ap­point­ments as if they are mere com­mon sense. For her part, Efi­ra reacts to blow after blow with sur­face com­po­sure, and then she car­ries on.

The child nar­ra­tor, Chan­tal, is born. Years pass. Some­times Rachel and Philippe see each oth­er. More often they don’t. Rachel builds a good life. My moth­er had no regrets. She had known grand pas­sion and now I was there.” The sweep of the sto­ry is nov­el­is­tic. Yet by sub­vert­ing the pre­dictable tra­jec­to­ry ear­ly on, Corsi­ni (via Angot) main­tains a sense of sus­pense while Efi­ra holds atten­tion with a per­for­mance of sto­ic beauty.

Her thought­ful nature is shown by the way she lis­tens atten­tive­ly to the peo­ple in her life. One motif is the two-way pow­er strug­gle that takes place between her and Philippe. As Chan­tal grows up, this pow­er strug­gle takes on a fur­ther dimension.

Then comes a twist that casts the pow­er dynam­ics between the gen­ders in a more des­per­ate light. As with all the events in An Impos­si­ble Love, it unfolds nat­u­ral­is­ti­cal­ly, with­out sign­post­ing, and big dra­ma does not fol­low. How­ev­er, every­thing that came before is recal­i­brat­ed. The stakes retroac­tive­ly height­en. A roman­tic dra­ma becomes a bit­ing social com­men­tary. And still the film con­tin­ues with a new exis­ten­tial ambi­ence con­jured by dis­il­lu­sion­ment, pow­er, sur­vival, what atro­phies and what endures.

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