It is not easy to find today romantic dramas or comedies really adult romanticscurrent films that go to the core of the complexities of emotional relationships. Nor that they really take into account the characters. Nor that they know how to tell what they feel and suffer, which sometimes is not what we assume they should feel and suffer. Nor that explain these affections or disaffections without falling into traps, tropes and excesses. Not to mention that the staging is as important as the text and the actors’ interpretation in order to tell what happens inside, what makes the characters happy or unhappy. Even so, There are exceptions.
The latest movies of Emmanuel Mouret (‘Chronicle of an Ephemeral Love’) or ‘Fire’ (2022), by Claire Deniswould serve as an example. They are now joined by another French film, the magnificent ‘Out of season’about the meeting in a small coastal town between a famous actor (Guillaume Canet) and the woman he separated from fifteen years ago (Alba Rohrwacher).
To tell that story, Stéphane Brizé (‘The Law of the Market’) not only takes into account all the things mentioned above. To the maturity of the text and the formal intelligence of the proposal (how beautiful the use of music and sound and the way of filming closed spaces and landscapes) is added a exquisite sense of humor and the complicity and frankness in the gestures, the look and the laughter of Canet and Rohrwachersplendid in the skin of two characters with the gift of leaving a mark (also in the viewer).
