Starring: Guillaume Canet, Alba Rohrwacher, Sharif Andoura, Marie Drucker, Lucette Beudin, Hugo Dillon
Distributor: Palace Films
Runtime: 115 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2024
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small town. After a short affair they go their own way until Mathieu unexpectedly finds Alice again.
Pensive. Unhurried. Melancholic. Tres français. Vraiment. Winter (hors-saison), a coastal French town where huge waves break on the rocks, or stream onto the vast beach whether anyone is there or not. We follow a car to a modern luxury hotel, where Mathieu, a popular film star (and Canet playing Mathieu is that). He has walked out on rehearsals for his stage debut. He goes for a thalasso – massage therapy.
Then a contact from the past. Alice (an excellent Rohrwacher) with a more than five minutes restaurant conversation with Mathieu. The film becomes more about her and there is much more depth, more regrets as her life, marriage, motherhood, life in the town over 15 years is revealed. And the former relationship in the grim break-up, his abruptly leaving her.
This is a film of conversations. Alice reveals her home life, the audience getting a glimpse, especially of her hurt, her relationship with her daughter, love, truth, her talent with the piano, her regrets… Alice has friends in an aged care home and there is a strong sequence (though not necessarily key to the plot), an interview with an elderly woman about herself. At the celebration, enthusiastic song, dance, and a fascinating routine, enjoyably long, that most of us have never seen before, one reviewer referring them to as bird singers, another as ‘avian impersonators’. The couple really do have a talent for imitating the birds and dramatising the variety of their actions. One of the cinema moments when you feel the urge to join the applause as they take their bows.
The interaction between Mathieu and Alice lingers on with questions about the future.
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