This year’s festival screens a film from one of its featured female directors, Katell Quillévéré, with her 2023 film le Temps d’Aimer (Along Came Love) that was influenced by her own family history.
Opening with black and white footage of France after the German occupation showing the double-edged images of cheering crowds for the liberation and those of women who had fraternised with German soldiers being publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved. The footage elides to black and white filming of one such young woman, Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), who is seen running home to try to erase the swastika that had been written on her pregnant stomach.
The palette holds hope as it shifts to the soft gentle colours of the Brittany coast where, wearing traditional Breton dress, Madeleine now works as a waitress, while bringing up as a single mother her 5-year-old son Daniel, played heartbreakingly by Hélois Karyo. Madeleine shows her love to her son by being a hardworking and dutiful mother, but Daniel feels unloved and dreams of his father despite being told he is dead. It is on a nearby Brittany beach that she meets François (Vincent Lacoste), a quiet, wealthy man whose later appearance as a diner at her hotel ignites a spark between them. But François has a secret that will haunt their life. After a hasty marriage they fall in to a life together but young Daniel remains on the periphery still yearning to know his real father.
A devastating fire in their apartment is set by a man known to François, whose vengeful act holds the inference of his being more than a jealous colleague, spurs them to answer an advert, and move to the industrial town of Chateauroux to run a bar. It is here that they meet American GI Jimmy Wayle (Morgan Bailey) with whom they have a brief ménage á trois,that exposes the flaws in their relationship. Again, young Daniel is kept on the sidelines.
The frequent use of close-up shots give the film some intensity but otherwise there is a general sense of disjointedness. Viewers find the couple suddenly with a young daughter and living an affluent life in Paris where François is a university lecturer, where his suppressed homosexuality becomes evident. These major changes in the couple’s life are shown with neither hints of what’s to come being woven in to the dialogue nor time changes being shown on screen.
Some other scenes, such as the mutual masturbation scene between husband and wife and the masked drag club, add little or nothing to what should have been a moving story.
Madeleine deciding to give Daniel, as a soldier himself, details of his German officer father to let him finally seek him out, gives a hint of redemption.
Running time: 125 mins
Age classification: 12A
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 