Movie Review: Mademoiselle Chambon

PITCH PERFECT: The performances of Sandrine Kiberlain (above) and Vincent Lindon are screen acting of the highest order. Photo / Supplied

A sunlit Gallic Brief Encounter, this French film of love confounded remains mostly on the right side of the line between exquisite and excruciating, thanks largely to the pitch-perfect performances of its two leading actors.

Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain were longtime real-life partners, which doubtless adds to the delicate empathy that builds between them: this is a film in which so much is said by so little - a glance quickly averted, a poorly disguised frown, a slightly too-resolute way of walking - that a blink has the impact of a gunshot.

It is screen acting of the highest order.

But it's frustratingly hard to decode the characters' motives, even as we get to know them. It's a film about social class, really (what French film isn't?) and we're left to conclude that the two lovers fall in love not with each other but with the "idea" of each other.

Read on that level it is more intelligent and less schematic: the railway-station finale is nowhere near as romantic as Brief Encounter's but the idea is the same.

Lindon plays Jean, a jobbing builder in a village in the south of France. He's happily married, a devoted father and an attentive son to his ageing dad.

Picking up his boy from school one day, he meets the teacher, Veronique Chambon. She asks him to contribute to a programme in which parents talk about their jobs, then wonders whether he can assist with a window that won't close. One thing leads to another.

It's these early scenes that are problematic and not just because Jean's Peugeot is improbably tidy for a chippie's car. Presumably Veronique's emotional isolation is both cause and symptom of her itinerant relief-teaching lifestyle, but their attraction has more than a whiff of cliché about it: she's mesmerised by his proletarian physicality, he by her cultural refinement.

The second part in particular seems at odds with an opening scene in which Jean and his wife Anne-Marie, wrestling with Jeremy's homework, are quite relaxed about their dim grasp of French grammar. Thus as the film reaches its climax and Jean makes a life-changing decision it's hard to know why.

For all that, it's certainly a love story that puts to shame the heavy-handed and showy garbage usually offered by that genre.

Jean and Veronique never seem like less than human beings. It's just that sometimes you feel like yelling at them.

Stars: 3.5/5
Cast: Vincent Lindon, Sandrine Kiberlain
Director: Stephane Brize
Running time: 101 mins
Rating: M (adult themes) In French with English subtitles
Verdict: Sublime acting in a slightly opaque love story.

-TimeOut