Mademoiselle Chambon (2009)

If you don't like movies with limited dialogue and smoldering emotions, run, do not walk, away from this movie. It is the sort of repressed love story that the French have mastered like no other film culture, and this is a spectacular version of the genre. Characters suppressing volcanic emotions that can be decoded only by reading expressions and body language give the movie a complexity and tension that transcend words--or, if you aren't into that sort of thing, make a trip to the concession stand seem like a good idea. The film examines a possible love affair and its consequences, with three main characters — Jean (Vincent Lindon), a mason; his wife, Anne Marie (Aure Atika), who works in a book factory; and Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain), their son’s unmarried grammar school teacher. The story is simple. The happily married Jean falls under the spell of Véronique after being invited to the class of his son, Jérémy, to talk about his occupation. Jean’s description to the schoolchildren of how to build a house was a lecture on how to build a comfortable, bourgeois life on a solid foundation, and it captures Véronique's imagination. She starts to look at him in a different way. The same happens for him when later he hears Véronique play the violin. He is transported by the romantic melody by the Hungarian composer Ferenc von Vecsey to a place that he cannot go without the music. They fall for each other--hard--and for reasons of their personalities, not their looks or their money or their status. The complication is that Jean is a traditional family man. He has a wife who is also his friend, a son he adores, and he is devoted to his frail 80-year-old father, whom he visits regularly in a retirement home. So a torrid love affair is not what he was looking for, and once his wife tells him she is again pregnant, he knows in both his heart andhis head that Véronique is not a long term possibility. But boy oh boy does it hurt. A questioning look exchanged and held for a half-second, the trembling of a lower lip, a stride that is a little too purposeful, a conversation that breaks into an uncomfortable silence: these are the signs of potentially life-altering choices and incipient chaos. And Jean's wife sees it as clearly as Jean and Véronique do. There are twists en route to the ending, where the inevitable must happen, reminding one to avoid falling for the impossible choices. Personal upheavals are as consequential in people’s lives as shattering world events--beware.